one must not complain
but bear
and pray for strength
Marco van Basten in the snow on the training pitch at De Meer, when asked what his favorite poem is, after which he read out this unknown poem that his mother always recited. Gedane zaken, KRO, March 21, 1987
I'm 90 percent certain that the only thing standing between me and reconciling with my creature is my own pride and I'm also 90 percent certain I won't ever be able to overcome it :/
Democrats have been trying for three decades to take this Senate seat. Will 2026 be any different?
Collins’ reelection strategy is simple: maintain her well-regarded constituent services operation. In each and every campaign she’s run, “it’s always been about what she can do for Maine,” as Tom Allen put it. It is about using her leverage in Congress, both as a swing vote and, now, as the top appropriator in the Senate, to bring money back home, not only in the months before reelection, but every minute of every term. Instead of doing big rallies, she’s doing ribbon-cuttings and groundbreakings on projects for which she has claimed credit. She’s visiting medical research centers she’s helped fund. Her website puts on vivid display, in map and list form, the specific earmarks she has landed.
“She quantifies her work to the voters as her primary reelection strategy,” Dutson said.
It works because it’s not just that she’s cutting checks and helicopter-dumping cash across the Maine countryside. She’s forming long-term relationships with nonpartisan interests and groups—firefighters, diabetics, healthcare researchers, Alzheimer’s research advocacy groups—that lock into her coalition. “That’s something that I don’t think you can put together in an 18-month campaign, or even in one term in the Senate,” former Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, who served with Collins on the Appropriations Committee, told me. “It almost transfers from generation to generation in a career like Susan has had.”
Democrats will concede the point here.
“She spent 30 years building relationships that matter with voters,” David Farmer, a Maine Democratic strategist and columnist, told me. He mentioned one of the YouTube ads about how Collins had led efforts to increase funding for diabetes research. “You know, it’s not like the Democratic side is pro-diabetes,” Farmer said. “But she has shown up for those groups and worked hard in that regard on these constituent service issues that have mattered. And that’s real. You can’t take that away from what she’s done.”
And it’s just in the past year that the real money started rolling in.
In 2020, Collins emphasized during her campaign that she was in line to be the next chair of the Appropriations Committee, a title she assumed at the beginning of 2025. While congressional appropriators’ authority has been harmed by the Trump administration’s disregard for congressional spending mandates, there’s still plenty of earmark money for members to spread around. And for the chair, it’s orders of magnitude more money.
“What you really get as appropriations chair is hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks,” a fellow congressional appropriator told me, “not what everybody else gets.” In Collins’ case, for the current fiscal year, the sum total—as she proudly boasted in a press release—was “$428,643,000” for 158 projects “across each of Maine’s 16 counties.” Maine’s smallness, too, ensures that she can fulfill her home state’s dreams while also being magnanimous with her colleagues. Another appropriator, South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, noted that she’s still been “pretty judicious” in spreading the pot around the committee, noting that “there have been appropriations chairmen in the past that have perhaps been more overt in the interest for their own state.”
“It’s a fine line,” he said.
Collins is not just touting the money she’s already brought in for Maine. She is unsubtly telling Maine voters that this gravy train has only just left the station. As she regularly notes, she is the “first Maine senator to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee in 92 years,” describing the moment of her chairmanship as “truly a once-in-a-century opportunity for our state.”
misogyny in the lgbt community is so fucking frustrating. maybe that woman isn't being an annoying bitch for complaining about sexism maybe you just think being oppressed via one dimension of your identity absolves you from doing any sort of work on yourself regarding other forms of marginalisation
Reading this article about folks in rural Missouri who fear the president has forgotten about them and I hope they know that isn't true. He hasn't forgotten you, because he never thought about you in the first place.
auto immune disorders happen when the immune system ignores regulatory factors and begins attacking healthy bodily tissues, due to what scientists refer to as "sheer love of the game"
i fully believe that kishimoto planned the naruhina and sasusaku pairings from the beginning which is why it's genuinely so funny and baffling that he didn't bother to include hinata in the story at all and just had naruto be in love with sakura until the literal final chapter reveal that he married hinata
dededos
germansingergirl
blakekathryn
baratheonpilled
izzy806
annaxmalina
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
