Trump’s biggest fan weigh in
by digby
Uhm:
Kim Jong Un of North Korea proclaims “unwavering faith in President Trump.” Thank you to Chairman Kim. We will get it done together!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2018
I never thought I’d see the day that the president of the US would be touting the endorsement of Kim Jong Un.
Seriously, when you are reduced to shouting that the worlds most ruthless and violent dictator thinks you’re great, you’re in trouble.
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Reading Rainbow
by digby
Colbert:
Perfect for a president with the mind of a child.
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M-fucking snakes, in the m-fucking White House
by digby
President Trump is not just seething about Bob Woodward. He’s deeply suspicious of much of the government he oversees — from the hordes of folks inside agencies, right up to some of the senior-most political appointees and even some handpicked aides inside his own White House, officials tell Axios.
The big picture: He should be paranoid. In the hours after the New York Times published the anonymous Op-Edfrom “a senior official in the Trump administration” trashing the president (“I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”), two senior administration officials reached out to Axios to say the author stole the words right out of their mouths.
“I find the reaction to the NYT op-ed fascinating — that people seem so shocked that there is a resistance from the inside,” one senior official said. “A lot of us [were] wishing we’d been the writer, I suspect … I hope he [Trump] knows — maybe he does? — that there are dozens and dozens of us.”
Why it matters: Several senior White House officials have described their roles to us as saving America and the world from this president.
A good number of current White House officials have privately admitted to us they consider Trump unstable, and at times dangerously slow.But the really deep concern and contempt, from our experience, has been at the agencies — and particularly in the foreign policy arena.For some time last year, Trump even carried with him a handwritten list of people suspected to be leakers undermining his agenda.
“He would basically be like, ‘We’ve gotta get rid of them. The snakes are everywhere but we’re getting rid of them,'” said a source close to Trump.Trump would often ask staff whom they thought could be trusted. He often asks the people who work for him what they think about their colleagues, which can be not only be uncomfortable but confusing to Trump: Rival staffers shoot at each other and Trump is left not knowing who to believe.Officials describe an increasingly conspiracy-minded president:
“When he was super frustrated about the leaks, he would rail about the ‘snakes’ in the White House,” said a source who has discussed administration leakers with the president.“Especially early on, when we would be in Roosevelt Room meetings, he would sit down at the table, and get to talking, then turn around to see who was sitting along the walls behind him.”“One day, after one of those meetings, he said, ‘Everything that just happened is going to leak. I don’t know any of those people in the room.’ … He was very paranoid about this.”The Times Op-Ed reinforces everything Trump instinctively believes:
That a “Deep State” exists. It’s trying to undermine him and — in the case of Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department, in Trump’s mind — is trying to overthrow his presidency.The Bob Woodward book, Trump believes, exposes that leakers are everywhere — and gunning for him.“People talk about the loyalists leaving,” the source close to Trump tells us. “What it really means is [that there’ll be] fewer and fewer people who Trump knows who they really are. So imagine how paranoid you must be if that is your view of the world.”
The Deep State now includes Trump’s own appointees and staff members. They’re everywhere…
5th graders are much more sophisticated
by digby
Trump gave an interview to the Daily Caller in the wake of the Woodward book. Here he is “explaining” that he thinks the United States is little more than a protection racket:
POTUS: “Yeah, I mean and I say to myself ‘OK, you have a country, it’s immensely wealthy, we’re guarding it. We’re spending tremendous amounts, billions of dollars to guard and they’re not reimbursing us. Why? I’ll be honest, I’ve asked countries, I’ve said, you’ve got to reimburse us. First, they don’t even understand the question. Within five minutes, they agree.”
THE DAILY CALLER: “Can you give us an example?”
POTUS: “They actually, no, but you’ll be seeing things come out. I’ll talk to you. They actually can’t believe they’ve gotten away with it for so long. I had one guy say ‘we knew you were going to be asking.’ Like they can’t believe it took so long. These are really wealthy — there are actually many of them. But these are really wealthy, really successful. They spend very little, I’ll give you an example, is NATO.
So we’re paying anywhere from 70-90 percent the cost of NATO to guard Europe. OK? Against Russia. We’re spending — you know, mostly against Russia. So, we’re spending 70-90 percent. Now a lot of people think, ‘oh it’s great for us.’ It’s great for Europe. OK? It’s not great for us. It’s great for Europe. And that’s OK. But they got to pay their share. So, I went there and I had a very successful meeting. And I was able to get them to spend big, last year, just with a low key meeting they paid $43 billion more. OK? As Stoltenberg said. This year it’s much more than that. They’ve gone way up. But you know, I don’t know if you’ve looked, NATO spending was going this way — people weren’t paying, you know why, cause no one was really asking. Our past presidents would go in, they’d make a little speech, ‘hey we’d like you to pay your bills’ and they’d leave and that would be the last thing. Ask, you may want to call him, but ask Stoltenberg what he thinks because he’s my biggest fan in a sense cause he can’t believe what’s happened. Now these countries are paying.
One of the best meetings, one of the most successful meetings I had was with President Putin. But the press, it was fake news. It was a great meeting. We had a great meeting. It’s good if we get along with Russia, not bad. And it’s good if we get along with China and now we’re in very much of a trade situation with them.
But we can’t allow them to take $500 billion out of our country every year. With Russia we had a very good meeting, but if you read the papers, it’s just all fake news. You know, we talked about Syria, we talked about Ukraine, we talked about Israel and protecting Israel. We had a great meeting and then I guess they wanted me to get into a boxing match with him on the podium. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Yes, he is a simpleton. And it’s the reason that Mattis said he had the mind of a 5th or 6th grader:
According to Woodward, Trump at one point asked his military leaders why the United States couldn’t just withdraw from the Korean Peninsula. They explained to him that it would mean we wouldn’t know about North Korean missile launches for 15 minutes rather than learning about them almost instantly, within seven seconds. This is the flap that led Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to reportedly suggest Trump was intellectually and temperamentally akin to “a fifth- or sixth-grader.”
What The Washington Post’s story Tuesday didn’t detail, though, is that this exchange didn’t happen early in Trump’s presidency; it came on Jan. 19, 2018 — almost exactly one full year into it. It came months after North Korea had threatened an attack on Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean. It also came a couple months after North Korea said it had developed a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could reach the continental United States.
What got Mattis’s goat, according to the book, was that he felt like they’d had this exact conversation many times before, and Trump refused to either remember or process it. As Mattis explained the reasons for a U.S.-South Korean alliance, Trump repeatedly returned to the idea that the United States is running a trade deficit with South Korea — suggesting the alliance was hurting the American economy. Mattis tried to explain that having troops in South Korea was actually the most cost-effective — and effective, period — means of preventing World War III. Trump, who often seems to misunderstand what exactly a trade deficit means, wouldn’t have it.
“But we’re losing so much money in trade with South Korea and others,” Trump pushes back at one point, according to Woodward.
At another: “We’re spending massive amounts for very rich countries who aren’t burden-sharing.”
And at another: “I think we could be so rich if we weren’t so stupid. We’re being played [as] suckers, especially NATO.”
Trump would argue this was merely him “question[ing] everybody and everything,” but it didn’t seem to come off that way to Mattis. According to Woodward’s reporting, it seemed to be Trump asking the same dumb middle-school-esque questions for the millionth time. And it drew a curt rebuke from Mattis that took those in the room aback.
He cannot learn. Which means that Mattis was being insulting to 5th and 6th graders with his comparison.
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Establishment Republicans tell GOP voters “we got this”
by digby
My Salon column this morning is about … what else?
This week, iconic journalist Bob Woodward dropped a nuclear bomb felt around the world with his new book “Fear: Trump in the White House,” in which he describes President Donald Trump as an unfit, unstable, amoral leader. Who could have ever guessed such a thing? He’s hidden it so well.
Actually, this is only the latest book about the Trump administration that portrays a shambolic White House organization led by a profane and ignorant president who spends his days rage tweeting and hate watching TV. Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” told that story a year ago and just last month former staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman‘s book “Unhinged” said the same thing: President Trump is incapable of doing the job of president of the United States because he has no clue what the job actually entails and is either unable or unwilling to learn how to do it. This picture of an unstable narcissist has also been told hundreds of times in news stories over the past two years in which staffers, friends and even family members have leaked a flood of inside information from the moment Trump was sworn in.
All this has been reinforced every single day by the president’s own actions. He reveals himself on television, social media and in print interviews to be so far over his head that he’s now fully immersed in an alternate reality in which he is exceptionally popular and wildly accomplished, on a level no president in history has ever before achieved. It is no longer possible to ignore the fact that he is literally delusional.
So why all the hoopla over one more book full of evidence of the Trump administration’s unprecedented incompetence? Well, for one thing, it comes at a moment of high drama in which Trump’s tepid approval rating seems to be going down still further, just as voters are getting fully engaged in the fall campaign. That is likely because of the accumulated bad news stemming from the guilty plea and convictions of the president’s close associates Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, his impetuous stripping of former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance, his childish behavior around John McCain’s funeral and, perhaps most important, the sycophantic display he put on in Helsinki when he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June.
It’s also the fact that this new book is by Woodward who, with his partner Carl Bernstein, broke the Watergate story and wrote the most famous books about that scandal. His reputation is, shall we say, somewhat weightier than Wolff’s or Omarosa’s. Even those who have problems with Woodward’s method must concede that he merely backs up a mountain of other evidence showing Trump’s ineptitude and corruption, including what many people dismissed as overly dramatic renderings in the Wolff’s book. It’s obvious now that Trump’s odious public persona is not a performance. He is even worse in private.
The one revelation in the excerpts that have circulated about “Fear” (set to be published next week) is that the president’s staff and cabinet members regularly ignore his orders. This isn’t surprising. Since Trump has no knowledge of government or the presidency, much less policy it’s undoubtedly pretty easy to withhold information and manipulate the flow of information.
On Wednesday the New York Times published an anonymous op-ed written by a “senior official” in the Trump administration that further supports Woodward’s reporting. This person claims that members of the White House staff are acting as guardians of the country by keeping Trump from going off the rails. It’s an astonishing essay in which this unnamed official admits that members of Trump’s Cabinet actually spoke about evoking the 25th Amendment. This person characterizes the president as an amoral, unprincipled oaf who has no idea what he’s doing, so he or she, along with others in the administration, have taken it upon themselves to save the nation, essentially patting themselves on the back and saying “You’re welcome” to what is presumed to be a grateful nation.
To those of us who have been paying attention, these saviors haven’t been doing much of a job. Woodward reported that Defense Secretary James Mattis belayed an order to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and perhaps there are more examples in the book of such close calls averted by these patriotic resistance fighters. But from what we can tell, it’s mostly been a failure. Trump has become increasingly unhinged and unleashed since the first of the year and he’s not just fulfilling that nice conservative movement agenda the author of the article clearly favors. He’s fulfilling his own, which is batshit insane.
For instance, several months ago there were reports of Trump screaming, “I want tariffs, bring me tariffs!” His economic advisers tried to hold off on delivering those, but obviously were ultimately unsuccessful. Although the staff has been able to keep him from firing Jeff Sessions, Trump of course did fire FBI Director James Comey and has repeatedly pressured the bureau into unusually punitive actions against others he’s named and publicly humiliated, including former acting director Andrew McCabe and former agent Peter Strzok. (Senate Republicans seem to have made a deal that they won’t object to him following through on his threats against Sessions, as long as he waits until after the midterms.) Meanwhile, Trump’s execrable immigration policies continue to be enacted, with the courts only shutting down some of the very worst excesses.
Trump has alienated U.S. allies with his simpleminded misunderstanding of NATO and his obsessive focus on trade deals he clearly doesn’t understand. Every tyrant on the planet has his number and is taking advantage with both hands. These supposed guardrails around democracy are pretty weak.
This anonymous official makes a point of taking credit for all the supposedly excellent things this administration has managed to accomplish, like tax cuts and deregulation and a dedication to “free minds, free markets and free people” (whatever that means). That suggests this is really a political document meant to reassure all those suburban Republicans the party is currently bleeding away into feeling some confidence that even though Trump is a bit of an embarrassment, there are good establishment Republicans in the White House making sure their needs are being taken care of. They can relax; the party has things well in hand. There’s no need to panic and do something silly like vote for Democrats in November.
When push comes to shove, Republican officials continue to be party animals first and foremost. In the end, that means supporting Donald Trump, no matter how crazy and chaotic this presidency becomes.
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“A whole new jurisprudence”
by Tom Sullivan
“I don’t know why they don’t take care of a situation like that. I think it’s embarrassing for the country to allow protesters.”
—President Donald J. Trump, Sept. 4, 2018
The person sworn to defend the U.S. Constitution uttered the quote above. Try processing the other events of this week. Just try.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is conducting hearings on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kavanaugh is nominated by a president who is an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal crime. It is a stretch to believe we would have held such hearings if Nixon had nominated a judge to the Supreme Court during the Watergate investigation. But we are today. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) finally addressed the matter on Wednesday:
“I want to begin by talking about the elephant in the room, non-theoretical,” Blumenthal said. “The president of the United States who has nominated you is an unindicted co-conspirator implicated in some of the most serious wrongdoing that involves the legitimacy of his presidency. There’s a distinct possibility and even a likelihood that issues concerning his personal criminal or civil liability may come before this Supreme Court as early as the next term. The issues may involve his refusal to comply with a grand jury subpoena or to testify in a criminal trial involving one of the officials in his administration, or his friends or his own actual indictment.”
Democrats suggested Kavanaugh had been chosen specifically because he would be friendly to Trump on the court. Blumenthal asked if Kavanaugh would commit to recusing himself in such a case. He would not.
Trump’s own staff members think their unindicted co-conspirator boss is mentally unstable. One (or more) of these “unsung” conservative “heroes” penned an anonymous letter in the New York Times. The writer credits the Trump administration with textbook conservative wins, but warns Trump’s impulses are “anti-trade and anti-democratic.” Notice which got first billing. This is part of what set stubby fingers flying late yesterday:
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
This attempt to shield true conservatives from being soiled with Trump-schmutz is simply “washing plain old regular conservative movement insanity in the blood of the lamb,” writes historian Rick Perlstein.
The internal resistance is working to keep Trump’s training wheels from flying off, just as excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book alleged earlier in the week. Even “going so far as to swipe and hide papers from his desk so he wouldn’t sign them.”
What so far has saved us from sinking any lower is not “a quiet resistance within the administration,” but Trump’s own inability to be all the autocrat he could be. It is not for lack of desire, notes Dana Milbank in the Washington Post:
Capitol Police removed and arrested the demonstrators — 31 of them by lunchtime. Photographers scanned the audience for the next protester to pop up, whack-a-mole style. Yet the hearing went on. The Republic survived.
A foreign journalist sitting near me marveled at the civil disobedience. “You pull that s— in Venezuela?” she said — then drew her index finger across her throat.
That’s true in many of the countries whose leaders Trump praises: Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, North Korea. Now he suggests protests should be abolished here, too. No civil rights movement. No anti-war protests. No Henry David Thoreau fighting slavery. No Boston Tea Party.
Praise Jesus. If not for Trump’s famous disgust for blood, the republic might be lost. Trump called yesterday for the New York Times to release the name of the traitor within his administration “for National Security purposes.” Somewhere in the White House a “hefty” Red Queen costume is ready for Halloween.
The threats are real and as unusual as the sitting president, Marcy Wheeler believes:
I actually think the constitutional problems presented by Trump are grave.
Our country has vested magical powers in The Word of the President. And for years, significantly bc 3,000 Americans died, we've expanded the power of The Word (abetted by many #Resistance heroes, btw).— emptywheel (@emptywheel) September 6, 2018
There were always interesting questions about that. But now Trump comes on the scene, with the power of The Word. And starts issuing Presidential orders via Tweet, some he means, some he later backs off on. We treated it as a joke but bc of the power of The Word, it's not a joke.— emptywheel (@emptywheel) September 6, 2018
We've literally rolled out a whole new jurisprudence about whether The Word issued by Tweet is legally binding, whether it's before the election or after, whether it happened during Executive Time or not.— emptywheel (@emptywheel) September 6, 2018
There is more, as there will be more today and every day until Congress grows a spine and stops the madness.
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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
Our Royal Babysitters
by tristero
The Times published an anonymous op-ed from a senior Trump administration official who claims to be part of a group of senior officials that is deliberately ignoring Donald Trump on major policy decisions. He claims (it’s almost certainly a he) he is doing so in the national interest.
This is a classic example of our dear friends, the Very Serious People, at their absolute worst. They’re as bad as Trump, in thrall to their own grandiose narcissistic delusion that they are saving the country from Trump’s worst excesses. How Great White Hope of them!
And meanwhile, as this fellow cheerfully admits, these clowns, in their unelected and unchecked arrogance, are merrily going about implementing hard-right policy choices that Trump supports — tax cuts for the wealthy, ruining our health insurance — they happen to like. But don’t question their motives or their judgement: Great White Fathers Always Know Best.
And check this out. Our Royal Babysitters are so deluded they actually think they are saving conservatism from Trumpism. No can do. Trump’s behavior and policies (actually non-policies) are exactly where conservatism has been headed since Reagan. Trumpism is modern conservatism. Why, even the late Great Moderate Conservative Maverick John McCain voted the Trump agenda 83% of the time.
And then there’s this:
Granted, it’s Donald Trump’s presidency we’re talking about here, but this right-wing nut and his fellow nuts have chosen to disobey the orders of the president of the United States as a matter of policy. This systematic refusal by Very Serious Republicans, once they hold high office, to accept any boundaries and limits to their power — and to pretend it’s patriotism, not proto-fascism — is utterly terrifying.
Finally, it is no accident this apotheosis of the Reasonable-Republicans-Will-Save-Us trope came out at the start of a crucial election season. It’s a desperate attempt to try to get the American people to ignore what we can all see plainly in front of our eyes — a deranged, incompetent president, the failure of modern Republicanism, and a federal government in chaos — and to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the weely big grownups is in charge.
Look, as every liberal has been saying from before the beginning, Trump is, of course, an existential danger and he must be stopped. But this cabal of immature, irresponsible, and stunted fools are as much a part of the problem as Trump is.
They really want to help this country? It is high time for the person who wrote this editorial, his co-conspirators, the terrible president they are enabling, and their entire rotten political party to get the hell out of my government.
Resign, guys. All of you. Now.
High treason and witchery by mobs of females
by digby
Some of the papers the suspect was carrying when he repeatedly rammed his truck into the @FOX4 building ranting about a police involved shooting pic.twitter.com/LNZMiNLsal— Natalie Solis (@Fox4Natalie) September 5, 2018
Clearly, his beef wasn’t just about the police-involved shooting. Witches and “mobs of females” were bothering him as well.
He’s mentally ill of course. But it’s notable how often misogyny seems to play into the motives of these men.
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Molly Ivins on Roe v. Wade
In light of the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, a man who is absolutely guaranteed to vote to end abortion rights for women and take us back to an antediluvian state of biological imprisonment The Texas Observer ran a Molly Ivins piece written in the aftermath of the 1973 landmark ruling establishing a woman’s right to abortion. It’s 73, so it’s interesting (edepressing?) to see how little the fight has changed. I urge you to read the whole thing. She was such a wonderful writer.
The following is just one part in which she profiles the lawyer, Sarah Weddington, who represented Jane Roe.
Weddington, who had thought she would either win or lose the case by a one-vote margin, is now convinced that the best course for the states is to do nothing at all. She will presumably have some influence in this area since she is a member of the Texas House of Representatives. At last check, no legislator had introduced any abortion legislation, although there were rumors that there might be some. But in fact, most politicians dislike nothing more than having to vote on such things — there is no way they can come out without losing support. Many of them not only dread the prospect, they have a positive phobia about it.
Weddington herself is something rather special. Although she feels she was not able to relate well to the Solid Rock League, if one can feature any abortion reformer ever getting along with that group, it would be Weddington. She is, to use an old-fashioned term frowned on by Women’s Lib, a lady, a perfect lady. She is grave, graceful and composed. “It’s not that Sarah doesn’t have a sense of humor,” said Ann Richards, an Austin housewife who was part of Weddington’s campaign braintrust. “It’s just that you gotta prep her a little. You say, ‘Now, Sarah, I’m about to tell you a funny story,’ and then she’ll just laugh and enjoy it as much as anyone. But you gotta warn her first, because it just doesn’t occur to her that someone might throw in a joke in the middle of serious business.”
–WEDDINGTON was recently mousetrapped in this regard by that nefarious jokester Cactus Pryor, who was preparing his annual spoof for the Headliners Club. Weddington, along with several dames of importance, was invited to pass preview judgment on a proposed new addition to a well-known Austin restaurant. The women were told that the restaurateur planned to open a Women’s Only section featuring topless waiters, two of whom then appeared and showed their impressive torsos to the group. Most of the other political wives in the group got off with a noncommittal, “Oh, my, my” reaction. But ol’ Sarah gravely launched into a lecture to the restaurateur, assuring him that while she meant no insult to these very nice-looking young men, nevertheless, she had never approved of Men Only sections and . . . The episode was being filmed for use at the Headliners.
Weddington has a unique family background for a small-town Texas girl. Her daddy has a Ph.D. and her mother a master’s. Her father, for many years a Methodist preacher in a series of small Texas towns, is now head of the Methodist youth program for this state. Weddington skipped a couple of grades of public school and so graduated from McMurray College in Abilene, magna cum laude, at the age of 19. She was certified to teach high school English and speech, but her practice teaching sessions convinced her that she wasn’t cut out to be a teacher. She looked around, and because higher education was an accepted thing in her family, had no hesitation about entering law school, which she finished at about the age most students complete their undergraduate work. She became interested in the Women’s Movement during her senior year in law school. She practiced briefly in Fort Worth and came back to Austin to open a practice with her husband Ron. Ron Weddington, who is also from Abilene, had spent several years in the service and so graduated from law school a few years after Sarah.
According to law school friends, Ron was the outgoing, social Weddington, while Sarah’s natural reserve and relative unsophistication made her a quieter, less party-going type. “I had never even been to a party where liquor was served until after I graduated from college,” said the minister’s daughter. On one famous occasion, she got annoyed with Ron and decided to “show him.” She forthwith got extremely drunk and subsequently quite sick. “I don’t think you even noticed,” she said to her husband with some asperity. “Not notice?!” protested Ron. “Hell, honey, I had to pour you into the car.” Weddington (Sarah) has not since been known to overindulge.
–WEDDINGTON and her law school classmate Linda Coffee started doing spadework on Texas’ abortion law as a result of their interest in feminism. When Jane Roe came to Coffee, Weddington volunteered to serve as co-counsel. The James Madison Constitutional Law Institute of New York helped with some of the expenses. Weddington wound up doing the oral arguments before the Supreme Court mostly, she says, because Coffee had joined a Dallas law firm and didn’t have much time to devote to the case. Weddington had worked on it all summer. Ron Weddington observed, “Sarah feels uncomfortable if she doesn’t know absolutely everything about every single angle of any case she’s working on. Hell, I’ve tried to tell her, a lot of lawyers really don’t know what they’re doing when they go into court. But you can’t make Sarah relax about it.”
Weddington had attended some sessions of the Women’s Political Caucus and finally decided that the only way women were ever going to get any experience in politics above the stamp-licking level was to try it themselves. So she pinned up her long, red-blonde hair in an effort to look more respectable and went down and filed for the Legislature. “At the beginning, I never thought I would win,” she said.
“Hell,” said Ann Richards, “I never thought she would lose.”
Sarah had first a dedicated hard-corps, then a whole troop and finally almost an army of women out working for her. Many of the women had worked in politics for years, making coffee, addressing envelopes, and being carefully excluded from all decision-making. But they had picked up ideas and expertise they were anxious to try out. Richards, who had worked in the North Dallas Women’s Club, Linda Anderson, whose husband Jamie worked in Sissy Farenthold’s campaign, Caryl Yontz, who had been with Yarborough’s P.R. people, and a legion more of very bright women who had wanted to get involved in politics but who had been turned off by the low-level jobs available in men’s campaigns. Weddington’s campaign was a slightly chaotic attempt at participatory democracy: it took more time and more effort, but even the lowly stamp-lickers were in on the decisions. The only male in the braintrust was Ron, who eventually left Farenthold’s campaign to sit in on this interesting thing his wife, of all people, had going. He handled the media work.
–THEY RAISED money by giving parties. They had beer and chili ’til it ran out of their ears. Ron couldn’t believe the girls were mad because they had raised “only” $300 or $400 at the first party. “For a local campaign, with no big press job!” he gasped. But they thought they could do better.
At the big Travis County Democratic Fair fundraiser in the spring of ’72, Weddington knew her opponent would be handing out expensive favors, flashy gizmos dreamed up by professional political P.R. types. Ann Richards gnawed her nails for a few days over that and finally thought, “Well, when they pick up all this junk from the other candidates, they’ll need something to carry it in.” So for 13 bucks they acquired a couple hundred shopping bags and stuck Weddington stickers on them so everyone else’s expensive favors went into Weddington’s tote bags.
Richards, who has never been short on brass, decided that the best thing to do with Sarah was to trot her around and introduce her to everyone who would logically oppose her. “We did this Laurel and Hardy routine,” said Richards. “I’d go in to jolly ’em up and break the ice and then Sarah would come on all soft and reserved and ladylike. She’d ask for advice and listen to it. She’s a great listener. Then people felt they had a stake in her. During the runoff, the Alarmed Citizens of Austin had her on their bad list. We called them the Alarmed Dingalings.”
Cactus Pryor observes that the Alarmed Citizens consisted mostly of Sam Wood, editor of the Austin American-Statesman, charging up and down Congress Avenue on a horse screaming, “The students are coming! The students are coming!”
Richards, nothing daunted, marched Weddington off to meet Sam Wood. Wood told her he had read, as he was sure everyone had, that blacks regarded abortion as a racist plot to lower or wipe out the black population. Didn’t she think her advocacy of abortion might hurt her in the black precincts? “Why, I’ve heard that too, Mr. Wood,” said Weddington sweetly. “But, you know, the funny thing is that I’ve only heard it from black men.”
And so they persevered, that group of women who turned out to know so much about politics. And they won. Weddington gives all the credit to her crew of women and the women give all the credit to Weddington and it’s a downright rose festival, it is. But Weddington, who is not what you could call a real politician, is at least too smart to turn loose of her ladies. She’s got them volunteering right and left, at her citizens’ information center, sitting in on committee meetings she can’t make, and here and there and everywhere. She’s got three big plummy, juicy committee assignments and, in typical Weddington fashion, instead of rejoicing over her power she’s worrying about whether she can handle it. The women who work for her have no doubts at all.
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He’s one of yours, Marco
by digby
Wow, this video. Alex JONES calls RUBIO a "frat boy" and touches Rubio on the shoulder. Rubio tells Jones not to touch him and that he won't be arrested because I'll "take care of you myself."https://t.co/AGRMrDBMGa— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 5, 2018
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones had a tense exchange in the Senate hallway during a break of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing with Facebook and Twitter leaders on Wednesday. Jones, who sat in on the hearing, crashed a scrum Rubio was holding with reporters, and the pair nearly came to blows.
Jones, an alt-right figure with a broad reach online, has complained that social media sites have censored him after multiple platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, banned or removed his content. He attended Wednesday’s hearing, he said, to “face his accusers,” and during the break he approached Rubio while the senator was addressing reporters and broke into Rubio’s comments repeatedly.
Jones pushed the senator to address concerns that conservative and far-right voices are being silenced online. At first, Rubio tried to ignore Jones and talked over him. Jones called him a “frat boy” and a “snake.” Jones also plugged his website, Infowars.com.
Rubio laughed him off, saying he didn’t know who Jones was — until Jones made physical contact, apparently touching him on the shoulder.
“Don’t touch me again, man. I’m asking you not to touch me,” Rubio said.
“Well, sure, I just patted you nicely,” Jones said.
“I know, but I don’t want to be touched,” Rubio said. “I don’t know who you are.”
Jones talked over him, saying he wanted him to be arrested, and Rubio said he didn’t know who Jones was.
“You’re not going to get arrested, man. You’re not going to get arrested; I’ll take care of you myself,” Rubio said.
Jones, surprised, looked at reporters and said, “Oh, he’ll beat me up.” He told Rubio he wasn’t “going to silence me” and called him “a little gangster thug.”
Pistols at dawn?
Oh, and Rubio definitely knows who Jones is. Please.
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