The trainwreck of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is the cost of not getting money out of politics (Will Bunch)
An Arizona Democrat's unfathomable opposition to progress is a win for her hedge-fund, Big Pharma donors, and a huge loss for democracy.
Published Sep 30, 2021
It sounds bizarre, but a $1,117.40 summer internship at a vineyard in the heart of California wine country may prove the ultimate saga in how Big Money has permanently broken American politics. It was as seen on TV this past week in Washington, where squabbling Democrats and an obstructionist GOP is showing the middle class why we can’t have nice things.
The eager worker who showed up during the coronavirus summer of 2020 was no ordinary summer intern, but a then-44-year-old United States senator: Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. That Sinema (who makes $174,000 a year at her day job) would spend a week picking and maybe stomping on grapes in Napa Valley for some pocket change actually isn’t totally shocking for the Senate’s most iconoclastic member — atheist and bisexual with a defiant openness, and a marathoner with a Ph.D. in justice.
What’s more noteworthy is who was hosting Sinema and paying her four-figure intern salary during that wine-soaked summer: Billionaire Bill Price, who not only owns the Three Sticks winery in Sonoma but also co-founded one of America’s most lucrative private-equity funds, TPG Capital. At the end of her internship, Price did something worth more than his intern’s modest paycheck: He hosted a $5,000-a-ticket fundraiser that benefited both the Arizona senator’s campaign but also a PAC that supports a gaggle of centrist — i.e., anti-progressive — Democrats on Capitol Hill. The Intercept reported that the vineyard fundraiser was a key stop on a Sinema summer 2020 tour that netted campaign cash from Price, his TPG Capital associates, and Silicon Valley legends like billionaire Bill Gates.
Flash forward to the politically fraught autumn of 2021, and Sinema’s opaque obstructionism has become the grapes of wrath for President Biden and their fellow Democrats seeking to invest $350 billion a year to continue child tax credits for the middle class, expand child care, fight climate change and offer free community college. The plan is foundering largely because of vague but obstinate opposition from Sinema and her money-soaked doppelganger Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, when Democrats need all 50 of their senators onboard. Advocates believe the real problem is how Biden and his allies want to pay for this: Largely by raising taxes on Sinema’s filthy rich patrons such as Price and Gates.
https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/kyrsten-sinema-blocks-biden-agenda-money-politics-20210930.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
to anyone what the hell that was all about? 
With a move like that she was making a point, or sending a message to someone, but who? And what was her dumb-ass message?
When everyone in your workplace thinks you're a raging asshole, chances are it's you, not them, who's wrong.