All hail Leader Pelosi
By 
(1) This is a beautiful bit of trolling of the Toddler in Chief. I don’t know about you, but I already have my popcorn in the microwave, and I don’t even like popcorn. I’m particularly looking forward to the pearl clutching from Clizza, Brooks, Dowd et. al.
Today, I wrote to @realDonaldTrump recommending that we delay the State of the Union until after government re-opens, as the @SecretService, the lead federal agency for #SOTU security, faces its 26th day without funding. https://t.co/K2oL8WGvqo pic.twitter.com/g3fIlxDbbK
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) January 16, 2019
(2) John Engler is apparently going to be fired by the MSU Board of Trustees tomorrow morning. This incident is a classic example of how utterly out of touch reactionary old white guys are with the changing culture surrounding sexual assault. Here was a situation where Engler’s only job was to say “I’m sorry these terrible things happened, and we are doing everything we can to make sure nothing like this happens again.” That’s it. That’s all he had to say, if he had to say anything at all. But victim-blaming is in Engler’s blood, so he couldn’t manage to hold onto a million-dollar job whose only real requirement was that its occupant not somehow manage to make the worst sex assault scandal in the history of American higher education even worse than it already was.
(3) It’s lame to criticize Kirsten Gillibrand for representing tobacco companies when she was an associate at Davis Polk. I mean if you want to criticize somebody for working for a big law firm that represents unsavory clients (i.e., all big law firms) then fine, but the fact that Gillibrand got staffed on Philip Morris matters is neither here nor there. I mean even if she had the option of begging off working for a particular client because of moral objections (this is possible to do at some firms but not others, and I don’t know what DPW’s policy was on this 25 years ago), that would just mean forcing one of her co-workers to do the unsavory work she didn’t want to do, which hardly seems like a good solution to whatever moral dilemmas working for a big law firm creates for people with progressive political views.
That several years later she became a partner at Boies Schiller, which represented PM’s parent company Altria, is merely testament to the fact that she’s an extremely talented lawyer (Boies Schiller is probably the most prestigious litigation boutique in the business).
Again if you don’t like corporate law firms — and there are many reasons not to — fine, but don’t hold Gillibrand’s employment history against her unless you’re willing to take the same attitude toward, say, Barack and Michelle Obama.