Judge for yourselves, kiddies. I think these ladies are in waaaaaaaaaay over their fat heads - kinda like a homosexual dwarf hittin' on Shaq. [Many thanks to Dennis Miller for that all-timer.]
From Black Voices comes this terrifying view of a crazed congressthingee:
Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee Accused of Verbal Abuse by Congressional Staffers
Though most of us know her as that black congresswoman with the beehive, Sheila Jackson Lee is actually a well-known Democrat representing Texas's 18th Congressional District in the House of Representatives.
Since her election victory in 1995, Lee has been an outspoken politician leading the charge on issues relating to minorities and civil rights in this country. She has been an ardent supporter of affirmative action, immigrant and women's rights, attacking any legislation that she feels disenfranchises vulnerable minority communities.
However, according to a recent expose in The Daily Caller, Lee's fiercest attacks have apparently been against the members of her own staff. The congresswoman is, reportedly, meaner than James Evans after working a long August day at the car wash. Former staffers report she's like Sho-nuff, Eviline and the mean lieutenant in Beverly Hills Cop, all wrapped into one.
Normally, Congress is meant to be a bastion of good breeding and gentility where civil discourse trumps nasty rhetoric and name calling. However, Lee must have missed that part of Freshman Orientation.
Over a 10 year span, Lee has one of the highest staff turnover rates in Washington, with at least 39 staffers leaving within one year. Over that time, Lee has employed at least nine chiefs of staff, eight legislative directors, and 18 schedulers or executive assistants, according to records of federal disclosure forms published by the website Legistorm. Nine staffers left within two months, 25 within 6 months.
Jonathan Strong, a writer for The Daily Caller, reports that Lee has handed out nicknames to staffers, including "you stupid motherf***er," and ex-staffers allege that she is hardest on African American staffers. "You stupid mother-effer' was like a constant," says one.
"Like, all the time. But the interesting thing is she would really project that behavior more towards her African American staffers... This is something we always talked about. We chalked it up to her just feeling more comfortable acting out her aggression toward a certain group of people versus others."
Another staffer said, "She is very strange in who she insults and how. For some reason, it seemed like she was racist against African Americans."
According to Strong, another Jackson Lee aide recounts the time her parents came to Washington to visit: "They were really excited to come to the congressional office. They're small town people, so for them it was a huge deal. They were actually sitting in the main lobby waiting area....[Jackson Lee] came out screaming at me over a scheduling change. Called me a 'stupid idiot. Don't be a moron, you foolish girl' and actually did this in front of my parents, of all things."
Another staffer remembers requesting a meeting with Lee to ask how best to serve the congresswoman. Jackson Lee's response: "What? What did you say to me? Who are you, the Congresswoman? You haven't been elected. You don't set up meetings with me! I tell you! You know what? You are the most unprofessional person I have ever met in my life." With that, Jackson Lee hung up the phone.
Former aide Michael McQuerry said his experience with other "difficult" bosses on the Hill prepared him for how to handle Jackson Lee. "I've worked for two other members. They did the same thing," he said.
"It was at first, I'm not going to lie to you, it was a rough patch with her and me. But I took her to the side and I let her know that, you know, 'Congresswoman, I'm a man before anything else.' And after that, we had no problems. We had no problems," McQuerry said.
Of the scores of Jackson Lee staffers contacted by The Daily Caller, only McQuerry offered an affirmative defense of the congresswoman's management techniques. "A lot of people just did not know how to go, and say, 'hey, that's inappropriate,'" McQuerry said."I am a queen, and I demand to be treated like a queen," Jackson Lee once said according to Strong, and apparently she wasn't kidding. Her employees describe waiting for their boss for hours on end, sometimes late into the night, while she attends events or even sits in her office watching TV.
"She liked to hold her staff meetings - she would individually pull in the deputy chief of staff, myself and some other people individually to go over different parts of her day. But she would literally wait until super late at night. None of us could go home... And if she called and you didn't answer, it was like World War III," the source said.
Jackson Lee's driver picks her up at her apartment one block from her office each morning and waits for her outside wherever she goes throughout the days and nights. (Clearly she isn't down with Michelle's Let's Move campaign...)
"Whatever time she told me to be there, I would always show up at least 20 minutes late, and expect to wait at least 45 minutes," said one of Jackson Lee's drivers. "She was making me wait in the car, sometimes upwards of five to seven hours per day."
One woman who interviewed for a job in Jackson Lee's office arrived at 5:00 p.m. and ended up waiting for over five hours. "I sat there, no kidding, from 5:00 p.m. until 10:30 p.m...She actually went out to dinner while I was sitting there waiting for an interview," the woman said. A Lee staffer called the woman at 11:15 p.m. after she'd just arrived home, to beg her to come back. The congresswoman was finally ready.
Apparently, there is no such thing as "Close of Business" in Jackson Lee's office. "In the middle of the night, people had to go get her garlic. She'll call you at two in the morning for garlic because she takes them as supplements," a former staffer said.
One staffer was at a midnight mass on Christmas Eve when the boss called. She didn't answer. "She got so irritated that I wasn't answering her call on Christmas Eve. So she called me every minute for 56 minutes," Strong's source stated.
Ex-staffers also told Strong that Lee often told staffers, "What am I a prostitute? Am I your prostitute? You can't prostitute me," and would demand that they run red lights. She has reportedly yelled at Secret Service Agents after they asked her driver to move the car, "I'm Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee! Who do you think you are?"
At least one ex-staffer's doctor advised them to quit due to the health toll that working for Jackson Lee was taking.
"We would sit around and try to analyze why she was so miserable," a former staffer said, "We all kind of felt bad for her. She was such a lonely, miserable person. And it must suck to work on Capitol Hill and have all of your colleagues hate you, right?"
Frankly staffers, I don't think she gives a damn. She says you all have "Ten Seconds."
Now meet Harrisburg's paranoid megalomaniac mayor courtesy of the Patriot-News:
'I'm staying,' Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson tells crowd of 250 at unprecedented rally
The calendar said Valentine's Day, but love wasn't in the air outside Harrisburg's City Government Center on Monday afternoon.
There were chants and slogans, some mouth battles and unvarnished rage, even a slushball directed at a too-curious-to stay-away Mayor Linda Thompson, as about 250 midstaters came out to demand her immediate resignation.
Thompson, by the way, isn't going anywhere.
Gesturing from the second-floor window of her office to the crowd below, she mouthed “I’m staying” during a surprise appearance about halfway through the boisterous rally.
On that point, Thompson is the decider for now: Harrisburg has no provision for public recall votes, and a mayor can be removed from office only through criminal prosecution or medical disability.
But organizers of the newly named “Restore Sanity to Harrisburg” movement pronounced themselves pleased with their first Web-organized effort. They promised to be back with their hammer of public pressure.
“Our purpose was in part to see if there were a lot of people in the city who’d be willing to work together to take further action ... to improve what’s going on right now” in city government, organizer Lisa Paige said afterward. “I think there are.”
Paige is a former city schools spokeswoman who quit after Thompson fired Superintendent Gerald Kohn.
It was hard to know if Monday’s turnout represented a peak for those already discontented with the seeming gridlock and dysfunction at City Hall, or a new groundswell against the embattled mayor.
According to interviews, about half of those in the mostly white crowd were from outside the city. Of the city residents in the crowd, most said they were against Thompson from the start.
“I didn’t like her in the beginning, and I’m upset because [former Mayor] Steve Reed didn’t do anything to win the election” in 2009, said Larry Thomas, 69, a retired Rite Aid store manager.
Still, this was an event without precedent for Harrisburg, where the local government is staggering near bankruptcy under the weight of a $282 million debt burden and a passel of other urban-center problems.
Until 2009, it was a city whose electorate knew nothing but re-electing its mayor. Monday’s crowd, by contrast, wanted to ride Thompson out with nearly three years left on her term.
“I don’t know what would happen if she resigned, but I’d find it hard to believe it could be any worse,” said midtown resident Terry Stark. “A lot of people were willing to give her a chance, but this is more than a case of freshman jitters.”
Many protesters were incensed by reports from Thompson’s former spokesman, Chuck Ardo, that the mayor had made repeated anti-gay references to City Controller Dan Miller, a top political rival.
“I am a gay male,” said Scott Heblow, a Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center employee from Harrisburg. “We don’t need that in a city that’s in crisis. ... And then to see her up there acting the way she did. That just shows her ignorance.”
“If many of us in our own offices or at our jobs would have said the things that she said, we would be fired,” added Michael Rios, 26, a Harrisburg Area Community College student and North Street resident. “So she needs to be held accountable for her own actions.”
But that wasn’t the only rallying point.
Out-of-towners voiced concerns about a possible commuter tax. One man said he was an atheist who objected to Thompson’s public injections of her faith into government.
Shipoke resident Kevin Oliver, whose sign read “God Told Me Our Mayor Is Insane,” complained about last fall’s proposed attempt to close the Paxton Fire House on Second Street.
“By making decisions like that as an elected official, I feel she directly puts us citizens at risk, and I have a problem with that,” he said.
Some simply came to gawk.
And not all the protesters were white.
“Linda, Lead or Leave,” stated the sign carried by Clare Jones, a former president of the Greater Harrisburg Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She said her problems with Thompson, the city’s first black mayor, relate to broader leadership issues.
“Leadership means you have to stop fighting all the time; with your own staff, at least,” Jones said. “It means you have to have the willingness to learn the scope of the problem that we’re facing with the city’s finances. It means stop thinking that people are trying to destroy her. ... If she’s going to stay and be the mayor, and do this difficult job, fine. If not, she should go watch soap operas.”
City police said there were no incidents in the hourlong rally.
But the event got an extra jolt of edginess when, nearly half an hour after the chanting started, Thompson, city ombudsman Brenda Alton and another aide stepped up to the windows overlooking Second Street.
About a dozen Thompson supporters surged forward, waving their signs at her. The mayor held her hands in a prayerful position and bowed to them.
Then the larger crowd broke out in a chorus of boos. People jerked their thumbs down, and “We want you out” chants were streamlined to “Get out.”
From the back of the crowd, a snowball smacked the office glass. Thompson appeared startled for a second and pointed down toward a police officer. Then she was back, hand up for her trademark princess wave.
“I’m staying,” she again mouthed, gesturing down to her office floor.
After another mayoral wave and a round of blown kisses, her aides closed the blinds, and the mayor was gone.
Paige vowed that protest organizers will be back at work planning a follow-up event in fairly short order and are urging all residents to stay engaged in city affairs in the interim.
“Keeping pressure on the mayor to function at a higher level may actually be productive,” she said.
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