Well, the Kossacks (of which I count myself a proud member) over at Daily Kos outdid themselves in sending a sweet smell of success to newly-elected Speaker Nancy Pelosi – and she deserves it!
At the suggestion of Daily Kos founder, Markos Moulitsas, they raised enough money to send 25,000 long-stemmed roses to her! And at her request, to share them with other Democrats and the largest bulk to patients at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
The @DailyKos community bought 25,000 roses for @SpeakerPelosi, and I had the honor of delivering about 7,000 of them. The other 18,000 were donated by the Speaker to Walter Reed hospital, will be delivered tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/tzOIosnA88
— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) January 9, 2019
This was not the first time Kossacks have flooded the office of Speaker Pelosi with roses. Back in 2010 they delivered 2,600 roses to her, other Democratic staffs and patients at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on her birthday as a “Thank You!” for her efforts in getting the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) passed.
This time the original goal was to raise enough money to send 10,000 roses, estimating that $10 would provide 3 roses. But they far outstripped their goal raising enough money to send 25,000!
Obviously, no office could hold that many roses, so at Speaker Pelosi’s suggestion, 8,000 were delivered to her office and other Democrats’ offices around the Capitol – and the remainder sent to patients at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
As you no doubt can imagine, you don’t just trot into the Capitol offices with 8,000 roses. It took the planning of military precision to accomplish that feat, with coordination between Daily Kos and Speaker Pelosi’s staff. And in fact, Moulitsas himself flew to Washington, DC and spent the morning helping carrying crate after crate up to Pelosi’s second floor office – which he described as “A great workout”. (I’d be drenched in sweat.)
But it did not only involve coordination between the Daily Kos and Pelosi staffs, it took the Herculean efforts of a wholesale supplier and florist preparer to get the job done.
There have been some people who point out that the money could have been better used – and as someone who donated both times, I really can’t quibble with that too much. But I will also point out that the people at DK raised over $200,000 at ActBlue just for Democratic candidates during the past 2018 election. So I would say they have a history of being generous donors – as witnessed by the fact that it only took an hour and a half after posting to raise the money for the original goal of 10,000 roses.
The order for the 25,000 long-stemmed roses was placed at the wholesale florist Potomac Floral Wholesale in Silver Spring. Jeff King, a sales team manager and public relations specialist for the floral wholesaler said, “It was the largest single rose order that we’ve ever received.”
King explained that red roses come in 20-50 different varieties with names like “Red Paris” and “Sexy Red” – but by coincidence, all 25,000 long-stemmed roses were the “Freedom” variety. A nice happenstance!
They ended up sending 25,000 roses at 89 cents a stem, or $22,000. BUT that does not include the cost of a local florist processing the shipment for delivery.
When you place a huge order like this, they don’t show up arranged in cute little vases. The blooms come straight from the fields, wild and packed into large cardboard boxes. That means someone is hired for picking them up, unpacking them, cutting the stems, removing excessive foliage, arranging them in vases, and delivering them.
That mammoth undertaking of processing 25,000 roses was handled by Angela Brunson of Blue Iris Flowers in Eastern Market.
As anyone who’s ordered flowers knows – it’s the middle-man that takes the biggest cut. I have no idea how many thousands of dollars it cost to have the florist pick up 25,000 roses, unpack 25,000 roses, cut the stems of 25,000 roses, remove excess foliage from 25,000 roses, arrange 25,000 roses and deliver 25,000 roses – but I’m sure it was a huge sum!
With 8,000 roses in the Longworth House Office Building, it was reported that you could smell them just on entering the building. Surrounded on all sides by the virtual garden of flowers, Speaker Pelosi exclaimed, “I’ve never seen so many roses in my life.”
At a time when Trump has cast a tumultuous dark cloud over America – and the World – Paul Hogarth, who managed the DK end, said: “We wanted to express our love for all the work she does and how hard Speaker Pelosi worked to get a Democratic majority.”
Founder Moulitsas added, “People wanted to do something nice for once.”
RESOURCES
https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/01/10/nancy-pelosi-freedom-roses/
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/03/bloggers-send-nancy-pelosi-260.html
BONUS
As you know, Paul Manafort’s “crack” legal team posted their latest filing on line with the parts documenting he was getting paid for the colluding he was doing while on the Trump campaign “redacted” – well, sort of redacted.
You can view a PDF of their failed filing here:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5677512/Manafort-20190108-Dc.pdf
All you had to do was copy/paste it into a word document – and voilà – the whole thing shows up.
It was a pain to reformat it, because it was in that weird legal formatting, but it did it. But if you want to see what Manafort didn’t want you to see, you can view it as my Word document on the OneDrive cloud here:
https://1drv.ms/w/s!AvRxVTeLcrBWtPg7S97c6HYuzRomjw
