|
the DON JONES
INDEX… |
|||
|
|
GAINS
POSTED in GREEN LOSSES
POSTED in RED 10/23/23... 14,879.23 10/16/23...
14,881.85 |
||
|
6/27/13… 15,000.00 |
|||
|
(THE DOW
JONES INDEX: 10/23/23... 33,127.28; 10/16/23... 33,550.27; 6/27/13…
15,000.00) |
|||
LESSON for October 23rd, 2023 – “A
DOLLY’S HOUSE?”
A DOLLY’S HOUSE?
Abstract: The House of
Representatives, dysfunctional and Speakerless at a time of peril for America,
needs a disciplinarian, not a partisan. The
only candidate who can not only unite its warring factions by wielding her
gavel to make them behave is Dolly Parton.
America is in the crapper. Wars, the economy,
crime, climate – all problems which need to be
addressed... except that Washington itself is paralyzed; the eagle’s wings
clipped by a partisan, evenly divided and dysfunctional Congress that cannot
attend to America’s problems without some resolution among the infighting
Republican zealots and aloof Democratic opportunists; the mean and the crazy
fighting the meaner and crazier over who gets to reign over this craphouse.
Our Dis-United States need a hero,
or a heroine and... due to the Washington strike-out and Hollywood strikes...
we can’t even find one in the movies or on television. Since the ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy
(R-Ca) struck his devil’s bargain with extremist in his own party, only to be
summarily and gleefully overthrown by... nobody... Congressmen have stepped up
to the plate – and struck out.
McCarthy. Scalise.
Jim Jordan... lionized last week by the Time’s editorial correspondent
Phillip Elliott who predicted... after Donald Trump weighed a campaign for the
Speakership, dropped it and endorsed the Representative from Ohio that Jordan’s bid for House Speaker
could get across the finish line after all.
“Not by finesse, mind you, but by threat.” (Time, Attachment Two)
Elliott opined that a Jordan-era House
“could be one governed with a blend of grievance and paranoia, but one that
could spark the far-right elements of the GOP in ways that never quite took
hold during McCarthy, Paul Ryan, or John Boehner.” The Republican Party had
been looking for someone who could match the GOP’s fringiest elements, and
Jordan certainly seems primed to service them.
But the same mathematics (with
Hakeem Jeffries’ Democrats voting as a bloc) that empowered the fringe to
obstruct election of the nominee, crawled beyond the fringe to bite Jordan.
Last Tuesday, the Full House
rejected Jorden a second time no clear path forward late Tuesday, except to
try again – whereupon he took a called three strikes and the umpires (his
fellow Congressthings) called him out.
Blame was passed around. Correspondents to the Los Angeles Time
letters section (Attachment Three) focused on one and only one target…
As
one of Donald Trump’s most prominent toadies, one wrote, “Jordan is acting on
the ex-president’s orders, which serve two purposes.
“First,
if Jordan had been installed as speaker, he would have served as Trump’s
mouthpiece, thereby enhancing Trump’s claim to enduring political influence.
“Second,
as Trump’s chances to prevail in next year’s election continue to fade, so do
his chances of leveraging delays in the criminal cases pending against him.”
Another proposed a constitutional convention
to change our bicameral legislature to a unicameral one. Then…
“There
would be no more acrimony in the House, because there would be no more House.
My daily TV news would look less like a toilet backing up into my living room
(and) I can get back to watching football instead of watching the House brats
fight over their little sandbox.”
With one of his allies out of town
for a funeral Tuesday, Jordan could afford to lose only three Republican votes
in the narrowly divided House. Mere minutes into the voting, he had already
lost four. Ultimately, 20 Republicans backed others for the job, leaving
Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries the top vote-getter at 212 votes, but still
short of the 217 needed to win the job.
(Time, October 17th, Attachment Four)
Republicans thought they’d made an offer Democrats could not refuse – and
they refused. (For a face by face, vote
by vote tally, see this.)
(Washington Post, Attachment Five)
Still expressing confidence (if a
little nervously) Jorden went back into the well on Friday – opening his 8 a.m. news
conference at the Capitol on
Friday with a long story about touring the Ohio home of Orville and Wilbur,
seeing their bicycle shop and their “gadgets and gizmos.” He marveled at their
first flight, in Kitty Hawk, N.C., noting that it “barely” got off the ground.
He then reminded reporters that, over the next 66 years, “We went from two guys
flying 100 feet to putting a man on the moon.”
But, after losing 25 Republicans...
three more than in the previous vote... Jordan took a called Strike Three and
then the Republicans’ so-called “Vandal Caucus” voted to veto the show.
“Back to
the drawing board,” a grim McCarthy said after
Thursday’s caucus dissolved in recriminations and fisticuffs, and Friday
afternoon’s conference meeting.
(WashPost again, 10/20, Attachment Six)
CNN on Thursday
aired harrowing
audio of the kind of intimidation
and threats that an increasing number of Republican
lawmakers says they’ve faced over their opposition to the speakership bid of
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). And it’s ugly. The caller leaves a message for an
unnamed lawmaker’s wife and, while repeatedly qualifying that they aren’t
talking about violence, they do threaten to harass the woman endlessly in
public.
The caller says the
woman’s husband must vote “Jim Jordan or more conservative, or you’re going to be
[expletive] molested like you can’t ever imagine.”
These threats — which
Jordan has now rebuked but for which some members blame him — failed or even
backfired. (Yup, WashPost 10/20/23
Attachment Seven) Rep. Don Bacon
(R-Neb.) remained dug in despite revealing that his wife felt
compelled to sleep with a loaded gun. Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) cited the bullying
as a reason
he flipped his vote against Jordan on the second ballot and wouldn’t go back.
“Politics
today rewards attention and money more than it rewards actually getting
bills passed into law,” said Mac Thornberry, a 13-term congressman from Texas
who was the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee before announcing his retirement in 2019.
Thornberry
likened the shift to a social media algorithm that serves up ever more
outrageous content to get more eyeballs.
(Washington Post, three days earlier, Attachment Eight)
“Now to
keep your attention, politicians have to be all the more sensational,” he said.
“I fear we are in a spiral.”
Post reporters Sarah
Ellison and Will Sommer blamed (or credited) “(c)onservative media stars” Sean
Hannity and Steve Bannon with stirring the pot and causing the spiral.
The
campaign by Hannity to boost Jordan, who has also been endorsed for the
speaker’s job by former president Donald Trump, began
soon after Scalise withdrew from the race. On Friday afternoon, Hannity tweeted that
“Any Member of Congress would be crazy to NOT support Jim Jordan for Speaker.
He is a natural born principled leader who will lead house Republicans to unite
vs the radical left.”
For his
part... after the Republican caucus nominated Jordan on Friday... Bannon
“ran a segment on his show publicizing the congressional phone number of Rep.
Steve Womack (R-Ark.), who had hesitated to support Jordan.
“Bannon
urged his listeners to tell Womack to support Jordan.”
Both
drew praises from SuperMAGAnoid Matt Gaetz (R-Fl)
@Begin a9
And now there are nine more (oops,
one dropped out last night, leaving eight)... obscure except in their own
districts... hungering for what was conceived as and should be a sort of
parliamentary order-keeper, supposedly tasked with enforcing the rules of
legislation, debate and an ultimate reckoning – the vote. Inst thtead, Speakers over the past decades
have increasingly thrust themselves into the process as order givers, often
using procedural tactics to gain a partisan advantage or, where this cannot be
achieved, blow up the system.
Which is not what our allies
overseas, our military, social and business leaders and the average American...
whom we’ll call “Don” as opposed to “Dow” Jones... want to hear.
Since the Speakership cries out for
applicants of quality, not quantity, for a disciplinarian – not, as dissenters dismiss the dismissilators as a “wrecking crew” or “vandal caucus” – the present partisan gridlock having engendered an increasing
proliferation of off-the-cuff, as opposed to off-the-wall, alternatives.
Desperate times
call for desperate measures...
One of the more
fanciful, if not quite as despicable or as desperate was the brief
bubble as emerged for an even higher office in 2020... a Romney/Oprah Independent ticket whose Number One
instigator and advocate was... Oprah! (That such candidacy would have ensured
restoration of President Trump convinced cooler heads that this was a bad, bad
idea... as it remains for 2024 given the likely intrusion of an RFK Junior
run.)
Concerned that the Democratic
field wasn’t up to the task of stopping President Donald J. Trump in 2020,
Oprah Winfrey had pitched Mitt Romney on the idea of running for president as
an independent, with her as his running mate, according to a forthcoming
biography of the Republican senator from Utah.
Ms. Winfrey floated the unusual
ticket in a phone call she placed to Mr. Romney’s wife, Ann Romney, in November
2019, according to an excerpt from the book, “Romney: A Reckoning,” that was
shared with The New York Times. (October 16th, Attachment Nine)
Mr. Romney at least listened to
the idea. (It was Oprah calling, after all.) He “heard the pitch, and told her
he was flattered, but that he’d have to pass,” the author, McKay Coppins of The
Atlantic, wrote.
In 2018, after she delivered a
rousing speech at the Golden Globes, some were clamoring for her to
run. But she told “60
Minutes Overtime” that she would not become a candidate in
2020 even though “I had a lot of wealthy men calling, telling me that they
would run my campaign and raise $1 billion for me.”
“I am actually humbled by the fact
that people think that I could be a leader of the free world, but it’s just not
in my spirit,” she said. “It’s not in my DNA.”
Remember... the partisan divide
dilemma and the increasing obscurity of establishment alternatives remain hostage to the one man whose thumbs-up or down can kill, if not make, a
Speaker. Of the Nine (now Eight) Little (fill in the blanks according to your
notion of political correctess), two support the results of the 2020 election
(which has caused Mister Trump to blackball their candidacies), the other six are conspiracy theorists, who would lose more than a few votes from the shrinking but still
necessary contingent of Republicans of moderate (or at least realistic) sentiments.
(So far, Minority Leader Hakeem
Jeffries has kept His Democrats voting as a bloc. It has been speculated by the professional speculators
that he wants to wear down the Grand Old Party to a point where six or seven
desperate and deranged pachyderms would prefer a deep blue Speaker (probably
Hakeem himself) to the current chaos.
Such a resolution is actually plausible but would, once operable, be
catastrophic for America – given the proliferation of obscure and arcane
procedural handcuffs that could be placed on America by even one Congressthing
with a grudge.)
Remember also: the Speaker does not
have to derive from the corpus of Congress.
Serious men and women, therefore, have proposed appointing former
President Donald Trump to the post. (His
problem is that, with amidst a House almost equally divided and minority
Democrats voting as a bloc, it takes only a handful of reluctant Republicans to
deny Trump... or any other trumpeting elephant of note... the election.
Remember, further: the Speaker does not even have to be an
American. Sasha Issenberg,
Washington correspondent for “Monocle”, cast her vote for the former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a free-for-all
hosted by the political magazine appropriately named Politico – which solicited
nineteen Speakerly suggestions from nineteen suggestors (1/7/23, Attachment
Ten), and there are plenty of globalists who would settle for a Macron or
Zelenskyy or Benjamin Netanyahu. (All,
however, seem committed to their present sinecures.)
Remember finally: he or she does
not have to be a Federal office holder, a professional politician at the state
or local level or even somebody with business or managerial experience... a
Bezos or Musk, for example. Not that
they’d take the salary cut... the pay and the perks may seem dazzling to Don Jones, but might crimp
their lifestyle. A celebrity of
patriotic disposition might suffice – but most (a Clooney or Rosie or Anderson
Cooper on the left, a Tucker or Hannity from the right) would run into just
enough opposition to scotch their Speakerly ambition.
Critics, comedians and mediots
animals of every stripe (excepting the yellow, but including the white down the
back) have entered the fray. Some have
played for laughs and ratings... lateniter Jimmy Kimmel touts Mike Lindell, the
My Pillow guy (hey... he needs the money).
There have been several sarcastic nominations for George Santos
Correspondents for Politico (above) offered up their
contenders, ranging from persons from the past (not only Liz Cheney, but her
Dad... who’s only two years older than President Biden, five years older than
Trump... as well as Boehner, Trent Lott, even Newt Gingrich) or the partisan
present (Chief Justice John Roberts, Democratic activist Stacy Abrams). There are the foreigners, like Issenberg’s
BoJo and, delving into the celebrity pool, Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the National
Interest, suggested the NFL’s Tom
Brady, a former MAGAnoid who has, he notes: “started to distance himself from Trump, demonstrating his political
acumen.”
Oprah was
not among those promoted for the lesser Speakership, nor was Judge Judy, but
the final Politico personality is the strangest... and might also be the most
electable and capable.
Dolly
Parton has everything you could want in a
speaker, advocates Politico’s own Kathy Gilsinan, “not just the bio as a self-made multimillionaire from
humble beginnings,” but a consummate
songwriter and entertainer, an advocated for childhood literacy and
philanthropist who kickstarted Moderna’s Covid vaccine and also runs a theme
park so, Gilsinan advises, “has lots of experience
with clown shows.”
“Who
better to lead one of America’s most-disliked institutions than one of its
least-disliked people?” she concludes.
Dolly’s political leanings and ambitions have flown under the radar for
years, primarily because they are simple, normal and... anathema in the hot
issue boiler room of politics, punditry and propaganda... bipartisan, cadging a
little from the blue meanies – she appeared with far-left icons Lily Tomlin and
Jane Fonda in the pro-labor blockbuster “Nine to Five” but “pointedly stayed
quiet” during their Trump roast during the 2017 Emmys – and the red tide - declaring on a 2019 podcast that “if we’re
having all these problems,”
(and this, remember, before the plague, the wars, the cratered economy, etcetera) “let’s
just, you know, why don’t
we pray for Mr. President?” (The Federalist, 12/6/19 Attachment Eleven)
As “a voice for working class
women” she has downplayed her celebrity, twice refusing entry into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame (who awarded it to her anyway) and, reported Lauren Michele
Jackson in The New Yorker, treated a proposal by the Tennessee legislature to
erect ginormous statues of her here and there around the state
“diplomatically.”
Repeatedly pressed for
endorsements on this or that issue or candidate, Parton said that “if she ever
found an interest in politics she’d run herself: “I’ve got the hair for it, it’s huge, and they could
always use more boobs in the race.”
She is not a Democrat,
nor a Republican, observed the Independent U.K. (27 November, 2020,
Attachment Twelve), but a representative of something else entirely –
“a Dolly party, if you will.”
“I don’t do politics,” she has said; “I have
too many fans on both sides of the fence. Of course, I have my opinion, but I
learned years ago to keep my mouth shut about things.”
“I like watching all of it,” she
admitted in an interview with the Showbiz Cheat
Sheet (Attachment Thirteen, March 29, 2021
“I watch
Fox News. I watch CNN. It’s like I don’t even know what to believe, but I just
watch it out of curiosity because it’s good television. Crazy, lunacy, but I
just don’t get involved. I am not political, and I refuse to get caught up in
political things. I just look at it, and I just think what I think. I’m just
saying, ‘Good Lord, what are these people doing? Crazy. They don’t care about
us.'”
Instead of editorializing, she’ll write a song to express her
beliefs. One of the most recent, “Liar
Liar”, denounces “greedy politicians past and present” but without
naming names.
“Liar,
liar, world’s on fire. Whatcha gonna do when it all burns down?” Parton muses
in the rock-infused song (thereby granting herself permission to accept the
Hall of Fame accolades), criticizing how politicians “wouldn’t know the truth
if it bit ’em” and have “lost sight of common decency, of wrong and
right.” (Washington Post, May 17th
Attachment Fourteen)
“Leaders
of the world, present and past, we better make a change and we better make
it fast,” she’d rhymed, adding that statesmen and dictators alike, worldwide:
“are just not doing what we need to do to have a world that we can be happy
in.” This wasn’t political, she insisted; this was her as a concerned citizen.
The
album also briefly sparked the rare Partonian backlash, as Dolly — a longtime
advocate of the LGBTQ+ community — received criticism online
for a duet on her album with Kid Rock, who recently filmed himself shooting
cases of Bud Light after the brand collaborated with transgender actress and
influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
“I try
not to criticize, condemn things as much as I just accept people,” Parton said,
according to Emily Yahr in last Tuesday’s WashPost. “So I can’t speak for Kid Rock. I can’t speak
for you. I can only speak for me. I try to love people. … All I can do is love
everybody. And if they need to change, that’s between them and God.”
Who,
suggested Constance Grady (Vox, 2/26/21 Attachment Fifteen) counts her among
His messengers... “a kind of secular country-pop saint.” Pouring on the tributes (“legend”, “genius”,
“glamour queen”, “titan” and, of course, “icon”), Grady asked “...what’s not to love about Dolly?”
Well, there are
the haters... the Ku Klux Klan protesting the annual Gay Day at Dollywood, a
biography by Sarah Smarsh (who reported that both Barbara Walters and Oprah
complained that “she
looked like a tramp,”) and rumours that Parton’s arms are secretly covered in
tattoos.
From the left arise contentions that her theme park employees are underpaid and that Dollywood’s “Dixie
Stampede” glorified the Lost Cause and racism.
(Subsequently... perhaps following
her advice to self that when you realize something is a problem, “you should
fix it; (d)on’t be a dumbass”... she toned down the “antebellum nostalgia”,
dropped the Dixie from the “Stampede” and, in February, 2022, the WashPost reported that Dollywood would “pay all tuition costs for
employees pursuing higher education.”
Asking her to solve America’s
fractured social landscape and comparing her to a “Jesus of Appalachia” is
“putting a lot on her... putting a lot on anyone,” Vox concluded. But the reality is this... the Speaker of the
House of Representatives more or less determine whether to weigh in on a
partisan side of any of the many issues before him or her, or sit back, holding
the gavel, and decree that debaters express their views with civility and accept
the vote of the membership. (And upon
those who refuse, impose order and discipline.)
“Don’t get so trapped where if
you’re a Republican, you got to be this way, [and] if you’re Democrat, you got
to be that way. You’re not allowed to think nothing else. Well, how crippling
is that?" she told the Washington Examiner’s Heather Hunter on October 11th
(Attachment Sixteen).
"I’ve got as many Democrats
as I do Republicans as fans, and I’m not going to insult any of them because I
care about all of them. I ain’t that good a Christian to think that I am so
good that I can judge people. That’s God’s job, not mine."
All she would and would be
expected to do is to make the Congress behave.
And a poster to the Crazy Ideas peanut gallery, posted this not-so-crazy
take on Speaker Dolly...
”Even if she didn't accept, the
near-unanimity of the vote would offer momentary respite from the deadlock. If
she did accept, we'd be in good hands.
(Attachment Seventeen)
The birds and the bees agree. So does an Angry Bear, who says: “Everyone likes Dolly Parton. She
actually is a stateswoman willing to do a thankless job. She would need to
brush up on the rules of the House, but I think she’s a quick study.”
Consequently: “I nominate Dolly
Parton for Speaker of the House of Representatives.” (Attachment
Eighteen)
Finally, can Don Jones voice his choice? Indeed he can… if his choice is for a Dolly
House. A Change.org petition is
circulating for Speaker Parton – and if you agree, you can join the
Movement! (Attachment Nineteen) Even if the House does manage to elect one of
the Nine aspirants, the tenure of said gentleman (they’re Republicans, thus all
men) will offend either one MAGA zealot or moderate, get kicked out and the
show will resume again.
Hopefully not before we have a budget settlement
and prospects for war in the Mideast, Ukraine or anywhere don’t escalate.
|
Our
Lesson: October 16th through October 22nd, 2023 |
|
|
|
Monday, October 16, 2023 Dow:
33,984.54 |
America
dealing with two and a half wars as Hezbollah (Lebanon) joins Hamas (Gaza) in
fighting Israel – which says its ground invasion will commence “soon”. With the land route through the Egyptian
border crossing at Rafah closed, due to shelling, Americans trying to flee
are boarding boats to Cyprus; Gazans, who increasingly lack fuel, food, water
and luck migrate towards the south.
The total death toll tops 1,400 in Israel, 2,500 Palestinians and
there are an estimated 199 hostages, including Americans. In Ukraine, Russia begins a new
counter-counteroffensive Congress remains defunct as Republican
infighting muddies up Speaker fight.
Jordan (Jim from Ohio, not the country east of the West Bank) pulls
within ten Republican votes of Speakership, but can only afford to lose
four. But he garners an important
endorseer... after looking over his own prospects, former President Trump
says he won’t play for the House and endorses Jimmy. Americans seeking distractions and
entertainment can watch the Taylor Swift concert movie that opens in real,
old-fashioned movie theatres, listen to the Rolling Stones’ first album of
new music in 18 years or look forward to either Madonna’s first tour since
surviving a bacterial infection or Dolly Parton’s halftime show at the Dallas
game at Thanksgiving. Dolly for
Speaker? (See above) |
|
|
Tuesday, October 17, 2023 Dow:
33,997.66 |
Israel promises to stop bombing hospitals
but life remains “dire” for Gazans. Offshore, the U.S.S. Eisenhower joins the
Gerald Ford in patrolling the beaches and sending warnings to Hamas not to
escalae the conflict (which they ignore).
So 2,000 American boots are scheduled to hit the ground “soon” in a
campaign to rescue American hostages... there are believed to be between ten
and twenty of them. Released from his “campaigning” for
Speaker, Donald Trump now has to deal with Judge Chutkin (the One Six
insurrectioary indictment) who gags
him again after he threatens witnesses, court officials and Special Counsel
Jack Smith. And Jim Jordan tries again
to garner the Speakership and fails again... losing even more votes, but
vowing to keep fighting on. On the picket lines, Ford orders the UAW to
settle... or else. They don’t – so “or
else” is a continuation of the status quo.
The Canadian strikers, however, are making progress in their
talks. No progress in Hollywood where
studio execs storm out the meeting with
SAG/AFTRA and it looks like more reruns and reality shows on the tube
for a long time to come. And layoffs
spread to a failing LinkedIn. There’s plenty of legal news for the Als of
America. Re-trial news brings a
victory for Alex Murdagh, whose conviction is set aside because of the
garrulous Court Clerk – but a defeat for Alec Baldwin when prosecutors claim
to have found new evidence to convict him of murder (or, at least, negligent
homicide). Cold case killer Joran van
der Sloot is hauled up from the Peruvian prison where he’s doing time for a
separate murder... he promises he will tell the parents of Natalie Holloway
about her death. |
|
|
Wednesday, October 18, 2023 Dow:
33,665.08 |
Israel
bombs a hospital in Gaza, killing over five thousand patients and refugees
hiding there for he night. But Israel
claims that the attack was a Hamas false flag. Later, some Americans elbowed in and said
that the real shellers were retro-terrorists Islamic Jihad. Howsoever,,, the attack caused PLO’s
Mahmoud Abbas to cancel his meeting with President Joe, who confabbed with
Netanyahu again and said Palestinias had no cause to be so angry., whereupon
Hamas declared another Day of Rage.
American police guarded sensitive sites, but little but the shouting
transpired. Van der
Sloot sings for the press and police, admits he bashed in Natalie’s head and
then threw her body into the ocean. It
wasn’t such a risk – Aruba, where the deed was done, has a statute of
limitations on murder and it has expired.
So if he can survive the next eleven years in a Peruvin prison, he’ll
be out to kill again. A man released
after 16 years from a robbery he didn’t commit is shot dead by police after a
traffic stop. And Brittany Spears has
a new book out, as says Justin Timberlake forced her to have an abortion. |
|
|
Thursday, October 19, 2023 Dow:
33,414.17 |
President Joe commandeers time to make a
speech advocating defense of Israel.
And Ukraine. And other things
and places. Raging ragers attempt to
attack American and British embassies, but are driven off. The U.S.A. officially enters the MidEast
war by shooting down several missiles aimed, presumably, at Israel and fired
off by Yemen. Iraq and Syria join the
fun... remember the last Iraqi War?
Israel’s Defense Minister upgrades his Gaza invasion timetable from
“soon” to “imminent.”
Jim Jordan loses another vote and keeps losing ground – but vows to
fight on, the way K-Mac did until the fifteenth round. (Apropos: “Rocky” co-star Burt Young
died... he was the guy who supplied the beef for Sly to bang on,) Sad
bomber arrested for creating explosive Teddy Bears. Travis Kelcey buys a new house. |
|
|
Friday, October 20, 2023 Dow:
33,127.28 |
Finally, some good news out f the
MidEast... Hamas frees two American hostages after President Joe returns from
Israel and makes a speech. Prospects
for an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza holidng at “imminent.”
Jim Jordan fails again to be elected Speaker, and it may well be
strike three as defecting Repubilcans search for increasingly obscure
substitutions. (Hello, Dolly – DJI, above)
Maryland
judge is shot dead in front of his house.
It’s not terror, tho’, just a disgruntled dad getting revenge on the
judge who awarded custody of the kids to his ex-wife.
More dirt from Brittany Spears’ upcoming tell-all... her teenage
romance with Justin Timberlake (N’Sync) resulted in a pregnancy that he
ordered her to terminate... and people blamed her for immorality.
Billboard announces the Top Five
Hundred Pop Songs of all time... and the winner is
Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”. (Britney’s “Baby One More Time” is number
Twelve; the “Macarena” by Los del Rio is #500,) |
|
|
Saturday, October 21, 2023 Dow:
(Closed) |
Yet another Trump attorney, Kenneth Chesebro cops a plea deal... no
jail time in exchange for his ratting out Donald Trump. Egypt, now claiming to support
humanitarian aid to Gaza civilians, allows a “trickle” of trucks (27) to
cross the Rafah border. Seven hundred
thousand refugees at the border still awaiting, food, fuel, water, medical
supplies and everything else. Three
hundred thousand left behind get more Israeli bombs. Americans optimistic. Not about Congress, though...
most of the Represenatives flee Washington to go home and raise money and/or
play golf. Some, pressed for comment,
say they should extend Patrick McHenry’s interim speakership and hard right
Matt Gaegz (R-Fl) says that Washington “is as swampy as swamps get.” SAG and UAW strike talks
dissolve... for now? |
|
|
Sunday, October 22, 2023 Dow:
(Closed) |
Egypt’s relief permissions trickle further down... only eighteen
trucks allowed to cross the border.
They are said to fear a US border-type invasion of people nobody wants
just as Presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) warns that the Mexicans
and Venezuelans are being replaced by Yemenis and Iranians with evil hearts,
minds and intentions. Israel pivots
(up or down?) on invasion from “imminent” to “looming”. They endure lectures on decency from
President Joe but are more worred about their northern border... Hezbollah,
Lebanon, ultimately Iran. Sunday talkster: Rep. Michael
McCaul (R-Tx) says Hamas is a Little League terror threat, Hezbollah (with
its hundreds of thousands of Iranian missiles) is the majors. Contending that the “world is on fire,” he
also warns the President Xi is watching from Beijing as events prove that
democracy doesn’t work. On other talkshows, the
left-wing blabberers say that right-wing media is abetting the Vandal Caucus
in its campign to tie up the Speakership and shut down the government; This
Week panelists believe the chaos will not end soon, if it all, because it
helps everybody’s fundraising. With the Northeast enjoying
its seventh straight weekend of torrential rains, New York’s upper middle
classes get another day off as mudslides halt Amtrck commuter trains to the
City. |
|
|
With benefits running out and prices running
higher, there was a sharp drop in the unofficial tally of unvalidated
unemployed that almost made up for all the worsening conditions in prices,
retail sales and... despite the stalling of the Israeli ground invasion of
Gaza... world conditions. And the
inability of the U.S.A. to attend to these conditions is nullified by the
ongoing political party games in Congress. |
|
|
|
CHART of CATEGORIES
w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000 (REFLECTING…
approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013) See a further explanation
of categories here… ECONOMIC INDICES (60%)
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
SOCIAL
INDICES (40%) |
|||||||||||
|
ACTS of MAN |
12% |
|
|
||||||||
|
World Affairs |
3% |
450 |
10/9/23 |
-0.2% |
10/30/23 |
451.64 |
450.74 |
Authoritarian parties win elections in Ecuador, lose
in Poland. India strengthens its
anti-gay laws. President Joe returns
from his (shortened) trip to Israel and makes a speech. NoKo deserter Travis Kay will be tried
for... desertion. |
|||
|
War and terrorism |
2% |
300 |
10/16/23 |
-0.5% |
10/30/23 |
291.42 |
289,96 |
Sad bomber arrested in San Bernardino for planting
exploding teddy bear in local parking lot.
Belgian kills two at soccer match – he’s either ISIS or a disgruntled
fan. Detroit synagogue leader stabbed
to death... hate crime suspected but not proven. |
|||
|
Politics |
3% |
450 |
10/16/23 |
-0.7% |
10/30/23 |
484.31 |
480.92 |
Judge Chutkin gags The Donald. Again!
Three time loser Jordan is decertified by Congressional Republicans
leaving Speakership open to anybody
(even Dolly, above!). |
|||
|
Economics |
3% |
450 |
10/16/23 |
-0.2% |
10/30/23 |
427.46 |
426,61 |
UAW strikes extend to Detroit casino workers. Opioid lawsuits drive Rite Aid into
bankruptcy. Netflix raises prices and
mortage rates top 8% for the first time this century driving down home sales, |
|||
|
Crime |
1% |
150 |
10/16/23 |
-0.4% |
10/30/23 |
247.99 |
247.00 |
MidEast war summons forth the scammers, seting up
fake charities for victims on both sides.
Man releaed from prison after 15 years for crimes he didn’t commit is
killed by police for a traffic stop.
Disgruntled Dad shoots Judge who granted custody to his wife,
Nashville police chief’s son steals car and shoots two cops. More murders in Fayetteville NC college,
Body found in a truckload of corn that Tyson was going to use for chicken
feed. |
|||
|
ACTS of GOD |
(6%) |
|
|
||||||||
|
Environment/Weather |
3% |
450 |
10/16/23 |
-0.2% |
10/30/23 |
398.60 |
397.80 |
Pleasant conditions most everywhere (except for
rainy Northeast), but the first (light)
snowfall of the season extends as far south as Texas. “Exceptional” storms batter Northern
Europe. |
|||
|
Disasters |
3% |
450 |
10/16/23 |
-0.3% |
10/30/23 |
424.25 |
422.98 |
Truck in Connecticut flips open: from 14 to 29 cows
die, depending on source. Near crash
on Portland airport tarmac as hundreds of Spirit planes are grounded for
inspection. Oahu oil leak further
plagues battered Hawaiians. |
|||
|
LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX |
(15%) |
|
|
||||||||
|
Science, Tech, Educ. |
4% |
600 |
10/16/23 |
+0.3% |
10/30/23 |
636.04 |
637.95 |
Amazon will use drones to drop prescription
medications – neighbors of fentanyl users express cheer or depression. |
|||
|
Equality (econ/social) |
4% |
600 |
10/16/23 |
+0.3% |
10/30/23 |
631.11 |
633.00 |
DC opens up a National Museum for women in the
arts. India increases penalties on
criminal gays. |
|||
|
Health |
4% |
600 |
10/16/23 |
+0.2% |
10/30/23 |
472.02 |
472.96 |
TV doctors say people who eat meat will get
diabetes. Ford recalls 200,000
Explorers with parking brakes that don’t brake and Tesla also recalls
“numerous” vehicles, also for bad brakes. |
|||
|
Freedom and Justice |
3% |
450 |
10/16/23 |
-0.1% |
10/30/23 |
469.16 |
468.69 |
Trump turtles Sydney and Chesebro cop guilty pleas
with promises to rat o ut The Donald. No
jail time, but Ms. Powell will have to write a letter of apology to the
American people! Clever Joran van der
Sloot confesses to murder of Natalie Holloway in Aruba... after the 12 year statute of
limitations runs out. |
|||
|
MISCELLANEOUS and TRANSIENT INDEX |
(7%) |
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
Cultural incidents |
3% |
450 |
10/16/23 |
+0.2% |
10/30/23 |
504.92 |
506.54 |
Las Vegas Aces win WNBA title. Billboard picks the top 500 pop songs of
all time (emphasis on pop – mostly
90’s-ish, “Satisfaction” fails to satisfy the judges so the Stones play a
warmup gig at NYC club with Lady Gaga).
Brittany Spears’ tell-all book details the horrors of conservatorship
and how Justin Timberlake ordered her to abort their baby. Taylor Swift concert movie leads Box
Office, but get rady for “Killer of the Flower Moon” (DeNiro, DiCaprio,
Scorsese) Dolly Parton (above) will play halftime show at Dallas’
Thanksgiving Day game. RIP:
“Rocky” actor Burt Young. UK soccer star Robbie Charleon. |
|||
|
Misc. incidents |
4% |
450 |
10/16/23 |
+0.2% |
10/30/23 |
485.72 |
486.69 |
Minnesota farmer wins the Giant Pumpkin contest with
a 2,700 pound jack o’lantern. Homeless
man wins $4M in lottery, says he will “find a place to live.” |
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
The Don Jones
Index for the week of October 16th through October 22nd, 2023 was DOWN 2.62@ points
The Don Jones
Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and
Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian
Doohan, Administrator. The CNC denies,
emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers
(including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin
Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works,
“Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best,
mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective
legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.
Comments,
complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com.
ATTACHMENT ONE – From
From the A.P.
House Republicans drop Jim Jordan
as their nominee for speaker, stumbling back to square one
BY Lisa Mascaro, Farnoush Amiri, Stephen Groves And Keving
Freking Updated 7:15 Pm Edt, October 20,
2023
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans
abruptly dropped Rep. Jim Jordan on Friday as their nominee for House speaker,
making the decision during a closed-door session after the hard-edged ally of Donald
Trump failed badly on a third ballot for the gavel.
The outcome left Republicans
dejected, frustrated and sinking deeper into turmoil, another week without a
House speaker bordering on a full-blown crisis. House Republicans have no
realistic or working plan to unite the fractured GOP majority, elect a new
speaker and return to the work of Congress that has been languishing since
hard-liners ousted
Kevin McCarthy at the start of the month.
Afterward, Jordan said simply
of his colleagues, “We put the question to them, they made a different
decision.”
The hard-charging
Judiciary Committee chairman said House Republicans now need to
come together and “figure out who our speaker is going to be.”
Their majority control
floundering, Republicans left the private session blaming one another for the
divisions they have created. Next steps were highly uncertain, as a wide range
of Republican lawmakers started pitching themselves for speaker.
But it appears no one at
present can win a GOP majority, leaving the House without a speaker and unable
to function for the foreseeable future, an embarrassing blow to a central U.S.
seat of government.
“We’re in a very bad place
right now,” McCarthy said.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise
said they would “start over” Monday. New nominees are to come forward for a
candidate forum and internal party votes.
Exasperated with no easy
solutions in sight, Rep. Mark Alford, a freshman from Missouri, was far from
alone in expressing his anger and disappointment.
“I gave up my career to come
here to do something for America, to rebuild our military, to get spending
under control, to secure our border — and here we are in this quicksand,” he
said.
In a floor vote Friday morning, Jordan’s third reach for the
gavel, he lost 25 Republican colleagues, worse than he had fared earlier in the
week, and leaving him far from the majority needed.
A founder of the far-right
House Freedom Caucus, Jordan’s run essentially collapsed in large part because
more centrist Republicans are revolting over the nominee they view as too
extreme and the hardball tactics being used to win their votes. They have been
bombarded with harassing phone calls and even
reported death threats.
To win over GOP colleagues,
Jordan had relied on backing from Trump, the party’s front-runner in the 2024
election, and groups pressuring rank-and-file lawmakers for the vote. But they
were not enough and in fact backfired on some.
Friday’s vote was 194 for
Jordan, his lowest tally yet, and 210 for Jeffries, with two absences on each
side.
In fact, Jordan lost rather
than gained votes despite hours spent trying to win over holdouts, no
improvement from the 20 and then 22 Republicans he lost in early rounds this
week.
McCarthy himself rose in the
chamber to nominate Jordan, portraying him as a skilled legislator who reaches
for compromise. That drew scoffs of laughter from the Democratic side of the
aisle.
Democrats nominated Leader
Hakeem Jeffries, with Rep. Katherine Clark calling Jordan, who refused to
certify the 2020 presidential election results, “a threat to democracy.”
The hard-charging
Judiciary Committee chairman said House Republicans now need to come together and
“figure out who our speaker is going to be.”
At a fundraiser Friday night, President Joe Biden offered his
own commentary on Jordan’s failure: “He just got his rear end kicked.”
For more than two weeks the
stalemate has shut down the U.S. House, leaving a major part of the government
severely hobbled at a time of challenges
at home and abroad. While Democrats have offered to broker a
bipartisan deal to reopen the House, the Republican majority appears to have no
idea how to end the political turmoil and get back to work.
With Republicans in control
of the House, 221-212, any candidate can lose only a few detractors. It appears
there is no Republican at present who can win a clear majority, 217 votes, to
become speaker.
One extraordinary
idea, to give the interim speaker pro tempore, Rep. Patrick
McHenry, more powers for the next several months to at least bring
the House back into session and conduct crucial business, was swiftly rejected by
Jordan’s own ultra-conservative allies and brushed back by McHenry himself.
A “betrayal,” said Rep. Jim
Banks, R-Ind.
Republicans predict the House
could essentially stay closed until the mid-November deadline for Congress to
approve funding or risk a federal government shutdown.
“We’re trying to figure out
if there’s a way we can get back with a Republican-only solution,” said veteran
legislator Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla.
“That’s what normal majorities
do. What this majority has done is prove it’s not a normal majority.”
What’s potentially more
unsettling is that it’s not at all clear what the House Republicans are even
fighting over any more — let alone if any GOP leader can fix it.
The Republican chaos that
erupted Oct. 3, when a small band of eight hardliners led by Rep. Matt Gaetz of
Florida orchestrated McCarthy’s historic ouster, has cascaded into angry
grievances, new factions and untested alliances.
Gaetz and the hardliners
wanted to punish McCarthy for a number of perceived wrongs, including passing
legislation with Democrats to keep the government funded and prevent a federal
shutdown.
But when Scalise won the
nomination to replace McCarthy, Jordan’s allies broke from party rules and blocked
the Louisianan’s rise. Scalise abruptly withdrew his nomination.
Angry that Scalise didn’t
seem to get fair treatment, more mainstream Republicans staged their own revolt
against hard-liner Jordan, saying he didn’t deserve the gavel.
Weeks of heated, fiery
meetings later, Republicans have drifted far off track from what had been their
House majority’s stated priorities of cutting spending and other goals.
Democratic Leader Jeffries
reiterated that his party was “ready, willing and able” to work with more
traditional Republicans on a path to reopen the House —- particularly as
Congress is being asked to consider Biden’s aid package for Israel, Ukraine and
other needs.
Jordan has been a top Trump
ally, particularly during the Jan.
6 Capitol attack by the former president’s backers who were
trying to overturn the 2020 election he lost to Biden. Days later, Trump
awarded Jordan a Medal
of Freedom.
First elected in 2006, Jordan
has few bills to his name from his time in office. He also faces questions
about his past.
Some years ago, Jordan denied
allegations from former wrestlers during his time as an
assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University who accused him of knowing
about claims they were inappropriately groped by an Ohio State doctor. Jordan
has said he was never aware of any abuse.
ATTACHMENT TWO – From Time
By
Phillip Elliott
Speaker
Jim Jordan Is Looking More Plausible By the Hour
Less than a year ago, his colleagues had to restrain
Rep. Mike Rogers as his temper flared and
he lunged at
Rep. Matt Gaetz on the House floor a little ahead of midnight on the 14th round
of failed balloting to pick a new Speaker. Rogers had heard enough from Gaetz,
a leader of the effort to keep Kevin McCarthy’s hands off the gavel, and Rogers
wanted to put an end to a four-day spectacle that laid bare just how
unmanageable the Republican conference had become. Gaetz finally relented, making
McCarthy Speaker with the barest of majorities.
But for a long stretch of time that evening, Gaetz
held all the power on the House floor as the C-SPAN cameras were rolling. It
was precisely that kind of Gaetzian chutzpah that Rogers, a McCarthy ally,
feared would become the norm, so he threatened the Florida lawmaker with a
walloping that never came.
Fast forward to today, when Rogers’ fears have
been proven correct. Gaetz laid in wait most of the year before leading the
uprising that booted McCarthy
from the job on Oct. 3 with no obvious successor in waiting. An initial attempt to
install Rep. Steve Scalise in the role failed ,
and the Louisiana Republican bowed out. It left establishment-minded
Republicans smarting and looking nervously at a bid from Rep. Jim Jordan, a
pugilistic partisan. Rogers on Friday told reporters at the Capitol that under
no circumstances could he support Jordan, whom Rogers saw as a D.O.A.
contender. Rogers went so far as to meet with
Democrats to see what concessions Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries would need to
start the ball rolling toward a coalition government that didn’t include Jordan
anywhere near leadership. For a short flash, it looked like Rogers, the
chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee, would emerge as the
leader within his party of anti-Jordan resistance, making Jordan’s rise as
short as Rogers’ temper.
But it appears Rogers has been swayed. He announced on
Monday his support for Jordan, noting that Jordan had expressed to him an
openness to passing a Farm Bill and a defense spending measure, two Rogers
priorities. Jordan, a former Ohio State wrestling coach and the chairman of the
Judiciary Committee that’s leading the impeachment efforts against President
Joe Biden, also snagged the surprise backing of former holdouts Michael Burgess
of Texas and Ken Calvert of California, both senior GOP lawmakers on their
committees. Other former “hell no”
holdouts like Rep. Ann Wagner of Missouri also managed to get to yes by Monday.
Maybe—and it’s a big maybe—Jordan’s bid for
House Speaker could get across the finish line after all. Not by finesse, mind
you, but by threat. After all, that’s Jordan’s M.O.
He and allies spent the weekend calling through skeptics
with a blend of sincere curiosity followed up with stern caution. What took
McCarthy two months of behind-the-scenes wrangling and 15 votes on the floor,
Jordan is trying to cobble together in mere days with little to trade but vague
promises not to shiv colleagues and explicit threats that opposing him will not
be worth the vote. As one close Jordan ally put it,
“he doesn’t have time for games or finesse.” His isn’t as much a game of
persuasion as browbeating .
His defenders aren’t wrong when they argue that Jordan wouldn’t be acting this
way if his tactics don’t work.
At the moment, Jordan remains short of the 217 votes
needed to install him, something even his closest allies concede.
The House majority is a delicate and perilous thing, and Jordan as the face of
the party isn’t exactly one that wins over the swing voters in suburbs, in book
clubs, or PTA meetings. Moderates rightly worry that a partisan zealot could
spoil their standing with voters who just want Washington to get out of the
way. Moderates are still searching for
an alternative.
Even so, Jordan plans to bring his promotion to a full
vote on Tuesday. The events will force House Republicans to go on the record
with their position on a Speaker Jordan. That implicit threat is part of
Jordan’s calculation, one meant to bully holdouts into falling in line; failing
to support House Republicans’ endorsed candidate for the top job could split
them from not just their colleagues but also donors. It could also be the
making of a tangible enemies list enshrined in the Congressional Record. While
major donors don’t love Jordan or his Freedom Caucus-style tactics, they are in
urgent pursuit of something passing for functionality and normalcy.
Even among the reluctant, there is a begrudging
acceptance that, at some point, someone has
to wield the Speaker’s gavel. Without anyone in the chair, the House simply
cannot do anything more than flick the light switches or refill the water
coolers. A standstill House doesn’t seem like that big of a deal for a few
days, but it’s approaching the two-week mark, and the legislative paralysis has
meant zero meaningful outlays from Washington in the wake of spiraling tumult
in the Middle East.
There are plenty of reasons to stay skeptical of
Jordan’s ability to rise to Speaker, and then hold onto the position. For one,
he faces the same mathematical challenge to
reach the magic number of votes to win the job in a chamber with almost zero
margin of error. For another, the rule as it stands allows any lone member of
the House to call for a vote of no confidence. With 55 Republicans voting against
Jordan during Friday’s closed-door conference meeting, there is no shortage of
peril ahead of him.
Still,
every successful Speakership comes with an incumbent level of risk. During an
era when Trumpist impulses and MAGA fantasy double as some version of a
governing philosophy, that appetite for risk only increases, and Jordan’s bid
reflects that. A Jordan-era House could be one governed with a blend of
grievance and paranoia, but one that could spark the far-right elements of the
GOP in ways that never quite took hold during McCarthy, Paul Ryan, or John
Boehner. The Republican Party has been looking for someone who could match the
GOP’s fringiest elements, and Jordan certainly seems primed to service them.
He’s still short on votes, but folks like Rogers linking hands—or at least
dropping their stiff arms—signals that the party may well be coming to accept
the fate ahead, however fleeting it may be.
ATTACHMENT THREE – From the Los Angeles Times
Letters to the Editor: Jim Jordan’s speaker bid
was desperate. That’s because Trump is desperate
(Compiled by J. Scott
Applewhite / Associated Press OCT. 22, 2023 3 AM PT)
To the
editor: I have one explanation for Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) desperate and failed attempt
to become speaker of the House.
As one
of Donald Trump’s most prominent toadies, Jordan is acting on the
ex-president’s orders, which serve two purposes.
First,
if Jordan had been installed as speaker, he would have served as Trump’s
mouthpiece, thereby enhancing Trump’s claim to enduring political influence.
Second,
as Trump’s chances to prevail in next year’s election continue to fade, so do his
chances of leveraging delays in the criminal cases pending against him.
In
short, Jordan’s failure to emerge as House speaker likely sounds the death
knell for Trump’s political and legal futures. Look for him to do Trump’s
bidding despite the growing risk of apocalyptic consequences for our
beleaguered democracy.
Sandra
Perez, Santa Maria
To the
editor: The turmoil that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) unleashed when he set in
motion Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Bakersfield) removal as speaker is beginning to
look more like an incredibly strategic and insightful move that may very well
help his Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis win the Republican presidential nomination
next year.
This
could be the end of Trump’s attempt at a second term in the White House,
especially with his champion Jordan failing to secure the speakership, and two
of the former president’s attorneys changing lanes and pleading guilty in the
Georgia election subversion case.
Jim
Kalin, Los Angeles
To the
editor: Since the House is starting to look like a dysfunctional family,
why don’t we just assemble Congress and have it pass a constitutional amendment
disbanding the House?
Or we
can accomplish this by having our state governors petition for a constitutional
convention to change our bicameral legislature to a unicameral one.
There
would be no more acrimony in the House, because there would be no more House.
My daily TV news would look less like a toilet backing up into my living room.
I think
our founding fathers would approve.
Then, I
can get back to watching football instead of watching the House brats fight
over their little sandbox.
Jacques
Porche, Las Vegas
ATTACHMENT FOUR – From Time
The
House Goes Another Day Without a Speaker as Jim Jordan Hunts for Votes
BY MINI RACKER
OCTOBER 17, 2023 7:15 PM EDT
After Rep. Jim Jordan and his allies signaled he
was a handful of
votes away from the speakership, the far-right Ohio Republican came
up embarrassingly short on Tuesday, prolonging the gridlock in the House until
at least Wednesday.
Two weeks after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was
ousted from the position in a historic vote, the House remained paralyzed,
leaving Congress unable to send any legislation to President Joe Biden. Even
more significantly, House Republicans had no clear path forward late Tuesday,
except to try again the next morning.
With one of his allies out of town for a funeral
Tuesday, Jordan could afford to lose only three Republican votes in the
narrowly divided House. Mere minutes into the voting, he had already lost four.
Ultimately, 20 Republicans backed others for the job, leaving Democratic Leader
Hakeem Jeffries the top vote-getter at 212 votes, but still short of the 217
needed to win the job.
Jordan, a founder of the ultra-conservative House
Freedom Caucus and a key player in the effort to overturn the 2020 election and
keep President Donald Trump in power, remained the only serious contender for
the speakership Tuesday night. Though as he remained unable to lock up the
gavel, some of his opponents began expressing interest in other options.
Read more: Expert on House
Speakers Says Jim Jordan Would Mark a Radical Shift
In the hours after Jordan came up short, many of the
holdouts, including Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida,
Kay Granger of Texas, John Rutherford of Florida, and Steve Womack of Arkansas,
called for members to immediately return to the floor for another vote, a move
that appeared to be aimed at depriving Jordan of time to work on flipping his
detractors. Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller Meeks, who voted for Jordan but had
expressed concerns about him leading the House in the party’s conference
meeting Monday evening, joined those calls for a speedy second vote as well.
Several House Republicans also backed a plan to expand the powers of
Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry.
“Until we can find clear consensus among the
Republican Conference, it’s time to give expanded authority to Speaker Pro
Tempore McHenry so the House can resume governing,” wrote Oregon Rep. Lori
Chavez-DeRemer, a swing-district Republican who added that she planned to keep
voting for McCarthy.
Asked by reporters about the possibility of empowering
McHenry, (Hakeem)Jeffries reaffirmed his support for a “bipartisan path
forward.” He suggested that McHenry was preferable to Jordan.
“I think he’s respected on our side of the aisle,“
Jeffries said of McHenry. “There are a whole host of other Republicans who are
respected on our side of the aisle. Jim Jordan is not one of them.
Jordan, however, was still working to secure the votes
he needed late Tuesday. He could be seen on the House floor chatting with
McCarthy and then Granger after the vote. In the afternoon, some holdouts
signaled they’d be open to backing Jordan, with one, California Rep. Doug
LaMalfa, explicitly saying he would after having cast his ballot for McCarthy
earlier in the day.
“Today’s vote for Kevin McCarthy was no aspersion on
Jim Jordan,” LaMalfa wrote in a statement
posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. “I spoke with Jim
after the first vote to confirm my support going forward, and he was happy and
understood.”
But so far, most of the Republicans who voted against
Jordan on Tuesday seemed prepared to hold the line, decrying the pressure
campaign they say his allies have waged. It’s also possible that some of the
members who backed him on the first ballot could turn against him as soon as
Wednesday. The decision by Jordan to recess and wait nearly a full twenty-four
hours before trying again suggested he was struggling to secure the final votes
he needed, the same problem McCarthy faced earlier this year. The House
adjourned Tuesday night with another Speaker’s vote planned for 11 a.m. on
Wednesday.
Opinion | On speakership, can Republicans make an offer
Democrats cannot refuse?
By Jennifer Rubin
ATTACHMENT FIVE – From the WashPost
Jim Jordan falls short of House speakership,
expects 3rd vote Thursday
Takeaways…
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) failed to reach a majority on
the House floor Wednesday, drawing one less vote for speaker than on the first
ballot Tuesday. He told reporters late Wednesday afternoon that there would be
no further votes Wednesday, but he expects another floor vote to be held
Thursday. Jordan, a conservative firebrand allied with former president Donald
Trump, is seeking to succeed Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was ousted as
speaker two weeks ago. Twenty-two Republicans voted against Jordan on the
second ballot. He can afford to lose only four.
Key updates
- Rep. Jim
Jordan (R-Ohio) told reporters there would be no further votes Wednesday,
but he expects...
- Rep. Jim
Jordan (R-Ohio) said of the resolution to give more power to Speaker Pro
Tempore...
- If not Jim
Jordan for speaker, then who?
The House went into recess after failing to elect a
speaker again. A Jordan spokesman said Jordan would pursue a third ballot.
Here’s how each House member voted
for speaker on the second ballot.
Some Republicans have begun talking to Democrats about
expanding the powers of Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.).
Here’s what to know about Jordan,
the GOP House speaker nominee.
Politics breaking news
reporter
Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez
(R-Fla.), a staunch supporter of former House speaker Kevin McCarthy
(R-Calif.), said he thinks Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) would probably lose more
support in another round of speakership votes.
“I suspect that if we
go to a third round, I think we’ll probably end up with more people voting for
somebody else,” Gimenez told CNN.
Congressional Investigations
Reporter
Rep. Jim Jordan
(R-Ohio) told reporters there would be no further votes Wednesday, but he
expects another vote would be held on the House floor Thursday.
When asked if there
would be a Republican conference meeting, Jordan said he would have to talk to
Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) about the schedule.
44 min ago
There is an aspect of the professed concern
about the lack of a House speaker that seems overblown.
American leadership is never particularly dependent on
whoever’s running things on that side of the Capitol (or the other side, for
that matter). Recent YouGov polling found that even a quarter of Republicans
weren’t really familiar with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House’s
previous elected speaker — suggesting that perhaps his role wasn’t as essential
as he might have thought.
ATTACHMENT SIX – From WashPost
House
Republicans go down in flames — again
By Dana Milbank October 20, 2023 at 7:26 p.m. EDT
On what would turn out to be his last day as House
Republicans’ speaker nominee, Jim Jordan was losing altitude. What to do about it?
Why, call in the Wright Brothers, of course.
The Ohio Republican opened his 8 a.m. news
conference at the Capitol
on Friday with a long story about touring the Ohio home of Orville and Wilbur,
seeing their bicycle shop and their “gadgets and gizmos.” He marveled at their
first flight, in Kitty Hawk, N.C., noting that it “barely” got off the ground.
He then reminded reporters that, over the next 66 years, “We went from two guys
flying 100 feet to putting a man on the moon.”
What was Jordan trying to say with this anecdote? That
his campaign wasn’t getting off the ground? That it would take him 66 years to
win the speakership?
If there was any aviation metaphor to be drawn from
the news conference, it was that his bombing run would continue — he said he
saw nothing wrong with “multiple rounds of votes” — until he had blown up
whatever vestiges of functionality were left in the House Republican caucus.
Mercifully, his fellow Republicans shot Jordan down about six hours later.
After another failed speaker vote on the floor Friday
morning — this time, Jordan lost 25 Republicans, three more than in the
previous vote — the GOP caucus went to a closed-door conference room and pushed
him to drop out. In a secret ballot, only 86 Republicans said he should stay in
the speaker race, while 112 wanted him out. Nineteen didn’t even bother to
attend; some had flown home for the weekend rather than participate in
additional pointless speaker votes on the floor.
Now, the leaderless and rudderless Republicans will
start all over again. The earliest they could vote on the next nominee, their
third, would be Tuesday, a full three weeks since they ousted Kevin McCarthy
and shut down the House of Representatives. And it’ll be a neat trick to get it
done by Tuesday, with eight announced candidates (so far) in the running.
“Back to the drawing board,” a grim McCarthy said after Friday afternoon’s conference meeting.
McCarthy (Calif.) blamed the seemingly endless chaos on the Republicans who
ousted him, saying “the amount of damage they have done to this party and to
this country is insurmountable.”
Added the former speaker: “We are in a very bad
position as a party.”
How bad? Well, on the social media platform X on
Thursday night, Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) got into a spat with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) over her vote for
McCarthy’s ouster. He then blocked her. Responded the
congresswoman: “This is exactly what’s
wrong with this place — too many men here with no balls.”
But it wasn’t just Matt Gaetz’s “crazy eight,” as
McCarthy calls them. Jordan, a far-right pugilist, made the divisions much
deeper, first by kneecapping Republicans’ first nominee to succeed McCarthy,
Steve Scalise (La.), and then by launching an intimidation campaign against
opponents that led to death threats against fellow Republicans and their
families.
At Thursday’s caucus meeting, Gaetz (Fla.) and Rep.
Mike Bost (Ill.) reportedly came close
to blows. The temporary
speaker, Patrick McHenry (N.C.) reportedly threatened
to resign. One Jordan opponent,
Rep. Ken Buck (Colo.), reported that he was being evicted from his office in Windsor, Colo., because the
landlord was mad at his vote against Jordan.
Leaving an unproductive session with holdouts Thursday,
Jordan held a handwritten note with a question he had apparently asked his
detractors. Captured by Reuters photographer Leah Millis, it said: “What is the
real reason?” (Answer: You’re a legislative terrorist.)
Incredibly, Rep. Scott Perry (Pa.), a Jordan ally,
belittled the death threats. “All of us in Congress receive death threats,”
he told reporters at Jordan’s Friday morning news conference.
“That’s nothing new. That is another red herring.”
Perry, when he wasn’t excusing death threats against
colleagues, was also preparing a resolution “removing the Honorable Patrick
McHenry … from the position of elected speaker pro tempore.” Rep. Greg Steube
(R-Fla.) was holding a copy of the resolution (which would inject still more
chaos into the House, if that is even possible), on the House floor Friday,
as captured by Associated
Press photographer Alex Brandon.
McCarthy gave the nominating speech for Jordan on
Friday, announcing that the always intransigent Jordan (who has enacted no
bills in Congress) “is an effective legislator” and is good at “reaching
compromise.”
Democrats guffawed. Republicans called for order.
After the failed vote, the “crazy eight” released a letter in which they offered colleagues that, if they
elected Jordan as speaker, “We are prepared to accept censure, suspension, or
removal from the conference” for leading the coup against McCarthy. (One of the
signatories, Buck, promptly disavowed the letter bearing his name, reducing the
band to the less-alliterative “crazy seven.”)
“If what these holdouts need is a pound of our flesh, we’re willing to give it to them,” Gaetz said.
But nobody wanted his flesh.
“I will not vote for Jim Jordan,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez
(R-Fla.) told reporters on the House steps. “It used to be that I was
voting for McCarthy. Now, I’m not voting for Jim Jordan.”
And Jordan supporters were throwing in the towel.
“There’s no more runway,” said Pat Fallon (Tex.). Troy Nehls (Tex.) said he
would vote for former president Donald Trump on the next speaker ballot.
Republicans went to the Capitol basement for another
gripe session. Once again, cartloads of pizza went in. An hour later, Jordan
had been dethroned.
They won’t hold the next candidate forum until Monday
— what’s the rush? — because “I think we need to give people a little bit of
time to mourn,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) told us in the hallway.
Gaetz left the meeting ready to cause more trouble.
“The most popular Republican in the United States Congress was just knifed by a
secret ballot, in a private meeting, in the basement of the Capitol,” he
fumed. Caesar!
For the third time in as many weeks, a Republican
leader had gone down in flames.
ATTACHMENT SEVEN – Also from the
Washington Post
Threats
couldn’t save Jim Jordan. But Trump-era intimidation has had an impact.
The holdouts on
Jordan’s speaker bid spotlighted a problem that has long lurked beneath the
surface
Analysis by Aaron Blake October 20, 2023 at 1:59 p.m. EDT
CNN on Thursday aired harrowing audio of the kind of intimidation and threats that an
increasing number of Republican lawmakers says they’ve faced over their
opposition to the speakership bid of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). And it’s ugly.
The caller leaves a message for an unnamed lawmaker’s wife and, while
repeatedly qualifying that they aren’t talking about violence, they do threaten
to harass the woman endlessly in public.
The caller says the woman’s husband must vote “Jim
Jordan or more conservative, or you’re going to be [expletive] molested like
you can’t ever imagine.”
The predominant narrative is that these threats — which
Jordan has now rebuked but for which some members blame him — failed or even
backfired. Jordan lost a third straight vote on Friday before the GOP
conference bowed to reality and voted against proceeding with him as its speaker designate.
While some GOP lawmakers on the verge of retirement
have in the past occasionally decried the scourge of threats in the
Trump era, we’re seeing it suddenly from a whole bunch of lawmakers who still
have political skin in the game.
I argued Wednesday that this is a significant moment — when so many
members with their careers intact unite to repudiate these threats. It has
occasioned a long-overdue conversation about their role.
But that conversation also should include a
recognition that these threats and intimidation can work, and probably have.
It’s true that more than 20 lawmakers have stood up to
the alleged intimidation by continuing to vote against Jordan. Rep. Don Bacon
(R-Neb.) remained dug in despite revealing that his wife felt compelled to sleep with a loaded gun. Rep.
Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) cited the bullying as a reason he flipped his vote against Jordan on the second
ballot and wouldn’t go back. Others said flatly that they won’t
give in to threats, casting their votes as a principled stand against the
intimidation.
But we’ve also seen members who swore they wouldn’t
vote for Jordan ultimately do so. Most who had voted privately in the GOP
conference assuring they wouldn’t back Jordan — 55 Republicans — ultimately
did. Some had their office phone numbers plastered all over social media after
they signaled their opposition and before they flipped.
It’s difficult to know whether that was because of
intimidation they were getting or anticipating; it’s also possible they simply
wanted to unite as a conference and/or got assurances from Jordan. But the
problem with threats and intimidation is that the real impact is often
unspoken. Nobody wants to broadcast that they gave in or to inflame those who
have already demonstrated a willingness to threaten. And until people speak up,
you just don’t know. Black Hand
That said, we do have instances in which Republicans
have cited these things having an actual impact on votes. And to hear certain
Republicans tell it, they might have played a significant role in the political
course of the Republican Party in recent years.
We’ve recapped some of this
before, but it’s worth
running through again at this moment:
·
Retiring Sen. Mitt
Romney (R-Utah) in recently published comments recounted how, during Trump’s
post-Jan. 6 impeachment, a member of GOP leadership was leaning toward voting
to convict him. Then the senator’s colleagues cited their personal safety, even
invoking their children, the Atlantic’s McKay
Coppins reported in his new book.
The senator voted to acquit.
·
In announcing his
retirement, now-former congressman Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) cited a deluge of threats after his vote to impeach Trump.
·
Now-former congressman
Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) suggested that the violence on Jan. 6 also weighed
heavily on not just impeachment votes but votes to certify the election, which
more than two-thirds of House Republicans opposed. “They knew in their heart of
hearts that they should’ve voted to certify, but some had legitimate concerns
about the safety of their families,” Meijer said. “They felt that that
vote would put their families in danger.”
·
Former congresswoman
Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said that during
Trump’s impeachment “there were
members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in
some instances, for their lives.” She cited how “members of Congress aren’t
able to cast votes, or feel that they can’t, because of their own security.”
·
The Republican
majority leader of the Pennsylvania state Senate said of signing a letter
backing Trump’s attempt to overturn the results in that state: “If I would say
to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I’d get my house bombed
tonight.”
The effort to overturn the election ultimately failed;
the two-thirds of House Republicans’ votes were in vain.
But to pretend that the actions of lawmakers didn’t
matter is to ignore what happened on Jan. 6. The fact is that Trump’s quest to overturn the
election was built upon an attempt to manufacture
legitimacy — something to
which the evidence in Trump’s indictments has repeatedly pointed. Republicans
didn’t really echo Trump’s bizarre electoral fraud claims, but they did offer a
watered-down version of the argument in the service of giving him backup.
By even pretending this was a serious effort, people became
inflamed. And to this day, as many as 7 in 10 Republicans
falsely believe the 2020 election was illegitimate, which is something with untold consequences for our
democracy. It’s completely valid to posit that the fear these Republicans have
cited their colleagues feeling led them to legitimize Trump’s efforts, which
continues to reverberate in our body politic.
Such is also the case with impeachment. But in that
case, it’s increasingly valid to ask whether intimidation actually saved Trump
from conviction. Never before had so many members of a
president’s party voted to impeach and remove him. The effort came up 10 votes shy of convicting Trump
in the Senate, but many Republicans rested their acquittal
votes on a technicality (that Trump was no longer president) rather than
on the merits of the case.
Given all we’ve seen this week and all that the
Republicans above have said, it’s hardly ridiculous to believe there might have
been more senators like the one Romney described whose votes were influenced by
fear.
We’ll never know if the absence of that fear might
have led to a different outcome; members surely feared for their careers as
well, and some might have sincerely believed Trump’s actions didn’t qualify for
conviction. But we weren’t that far away from a situation in which Trump would
be convicted and possibly barred from waging his current campaign for a return
to the presidency.
And the events of this week should probably lead to
some introspection from Republicans about how they’ve allowed this situation to
fester — and even made questions like this seem legitimate to ask.
ATTACHMENT EIGHT – From the Washington
Post
How
Hannity, Bannon and others on the right helped fuel GOP speaker chaos
Conservative media
stars have had enormous influence over Republicans’ futile search for a leader
By Sarah
Ellison and Will Sommer
October 17, 2023 at 6:08 p.m. EDT
Fox News host Sean
Hannity vented to his millions of viewers Monday night about the state of the
Republican effort to name a new House speaker — taking special aim at the “few
sensitive little snowflakes in Congress” who were not supporting his preferred
GOP candidate, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio.
Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in
your inbox weekdays.
But the widely watched
conservative pundit wasn’t only using his televised bully pulpit to
pressure the holdouts. Hannity also spent the weekend personally calling
several and having one of his producers reach out to others to lobby them
on their vote. He also took to social media to encourage his followers to call
wavering members and demand they fall into line.
The House GOP’s
two disruptive poles
Hannity’s effort to
personally whip up votes for Jordan highlights the central role that
right-wing media has played in the weeks-long drama engulfing Capitol Hill
over who will wield the speaker’s gavel.
At each turn,
conservative media figures such as Hannity and former Trump adviser
Stephen K. Bannon have injected high-profile disruption into a process
that normally plays out quietly behind the scenes in Capitol Hill corridors. A
handful of backbench lawmakers have seized the opportunity to flex their power
in a nearly evenly split chamber, creating drama but offering little direction.
Hannity claims some
GOP members want Trump as House Speaker
Citing unnamed sources
on Oct. 3, Fox News host Sean Hannity said some GOP House members attempted to
draft former president Donald Trump to be House Speaker.
As of Tuesday
afternoon, when Jordan lost an initial vote of the full House, it was unclear
whether the turbulent series of events would end with a congressman long relegated to the hard-right fringe elevated to lead the
chamber. But the overall picture of the legislative branch in chaos — and the
allure of the media spotlight helping to drive the dysfunction — was
well-established.
“Politics today
rewards attention and money more than it rewards actually getting bills
passed into law,” said Mac Thornberry, a 13-term congressman from Texas who was
the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee before announcing his retirement in 2019.
Thornberry likened the
shift to a social media algorithm that serves up ever more outrageous content
to get more eyeballs.
“Now to keep your
attention, politicians have to be all the more sensational,” he said. “I fear
we are in a spiral.”
The uncertainty over
who would preside over the House began this month when Rep. Kevin McCarthy
(R-Calif.) was ousted by a band of rebellious hard-right members. The leader,
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), had become a right-wing media star based on his
willingness to topple the established order.
Then House
Republicans’ original preferred replacement — Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) — had
to withdraw from contention after failing to consolidate the support of
hard-right members and the media figures who back them. Now Hannity and others
are leaning on Jordan’s critics to get behind the Ohio congressman, who has
long been a favorite of Fox News and other conservative outlets.
The campaign by
Hannity to boost Jordan, who has also been endorsed for the speaker’s job by
former president Donald Trump, began soon after Scalise withdrew from the
race. On Friday afternoon, Hannity tweeted that “Any Member of Congress would be
crazy to NOT support Jim Jordan for Speaker. He is a natural born principled
leader who will lead house Republicans to unite vs the radical left.” Hannity
went on to provide the switchboard number for the House of
Representatives, and urged his followers to “call your member and tell them.”
Over the weekend,
Hannity reached out to several holdout lawmakers who were not supporting Jordan,
while one of his producers contacted lawmakers with an email asking why they
weren’t backing him. The producer’s email, which was first reported by Axios
and has been confirmed by The Washington Post, included a leading question:
“Hannity would like to know why during a war breaking out between Israel and
Hamas, with a war in Ukraine, with the wide open borders, with a budget that’s
unfinished why would Rep xxx be against Rep Jim Jordan for speaker?”
Hannity has been
joined in his quest by other high-profile hosts, including Bannon, who has
helped to spur the pressure campaign for Jordan on his podcast, “War Room.”
After the Republican caucus nominated Jordan on Friday, Bannon ran a
segment on his show publicizing the congressional phone number of Rep. Steve
Womack (R-Ark.), who had hesitated to support Jordan.
Bannon urged his
listeners to tell Womack to support Jordan.
“You’re in a super
MAGA district, you gotta get your mind right,” Bannon said.
On Monday, Gaetz
praised Bannon’s audience for deluging Republican lawmakers with phone calls
urging them to get on what Gaetz called the “Jordan train.”
But in a measure of
the limits of those kinds of pressure tactics, Womack on Tuesday was among the
20 Republicans who declined to support Jordan in the floor vote. Womack, who
voted for Scalise instead, said the GOP’s initial nominee had been “kneecapped”
before he could get his own vote before the full House.
“It was the most egregious act against a
sitting member of our conference I have witnessed,” he said.
Other efforts to flip
votes were more successful. When Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.), who had been a
leading Jordan holdout, announced that he would instead back Jordan on Monday,
Gaetz broke the news on Bannon’s show and thanked the podcaster’s audience.
“It seems as though
Congressman Rogers has been sufficiently encouraged,” Gaetz said.
Some members have been
unusually outspoken in blasting their colleagues for playing to the cameras.
Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) tweeted last week that his fellow members were making
decisions based on “egos and TV time.” McCarthy, meanwhile, was unequivocal in
identifying what he saw as the reasons Gaetz had moved against him. “It had
nothing to do about spending,” he told reporters shortly after his ouster. “It
all was about getting attention from you.”
The dynamic of
attention-seeking over substance may be more pronounced than it has been in the
past, but it is not new.
“For a long time we’ve
seen politicians who have vied for media attention in order to raise their
profile and raise money,” said Kathryn Brownell, who teaches history at Purdue
University. “It elevates a slash-and-burn style and it changes the party to
something more about viral moments and less about governance.” @bacterial?
In the case of the
speaker fight, the consequence has been a string of firsts that hint at the underlying chaos: the
first 15-round speaker election in nearly two centuries when McCarthy was
chosen in January; the first ouster of a speaker by a vote of the House when he
was deposed this month; and the first vacancy in over half a century to last
two weeks or more.
Eric Bolling, a host
for the conservative network Newsmax, said that in recent decades, “the biggest
media darlings” tend to be “the ones who get elected, promoted and rise the
highest in the political ranks.”
Chris Stirewalt, a
former politics editor at Fox News, noted that the selection of a new
speaker “is, and should be, a very boring moment to most Americans. Under
normal circumstances, most Americans can’t name the speaker of the House.”
But this time, Stirewalt
said, the story has become a personal drama seemingly made for
reality television, with the “entertainment wing” of the GOP fueling the
action.
The battle between
Scalise and Jordan last week was not “an ideological struggle,” added
Stirewalt, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and
political editor at NewsNation. “It’s an attitudinal struggle.” Scalise and
Jordan are both conservatives, but Jordan was willing to do things that Scalise
wasn’t to try to secure the job.
Previous Republican
speakers have had tortured tenures as they have attempted to govern in the face
of factions trying to wield outsize power by leveraging their influence on the
airwaves. For instance, unlike McCarthy, John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) wasn’t voted
out of office. But he did step aside under pressure in 2015 after the Freedom
Caucus, led in part by Jordan and backed by Fox, made the Republican conference
ungovernable.
“There’s a tendency to
blame the fringe of the Republican Party. But those people used to be the
fringe and they climbed the party ladder using the same tactics,” said
Brownell, author of the book “24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America From
Watergate to Fox News.”
A case in point is
Newt Gingrich, who was speaker during the late 1990s. After Gaetz began pushing
for McCarthy’s ouster this fall, Gingrich wrote an opinion piece accusing Gaetz of “destroying the House
GOP’s ability to govern.”
Such allegations are
ironic coming from Gingrich, Brownell said, given that Gingrich’s rise was
largely fueled by his own battlefield mentality in Congress and his willingness
to court media attention.
“It changed the party,
making it more about the attention economy and less about governance,” she
said. When McCarthy was elected speaker, he was able to win mainstream
Republicans over to positions held by the Freedom Caucus, Stirewalt said, which
in turn allowed McCarthy to “establish his bona fides as a right-wing media star.”
But once in power,
McCarthy had to make deals with Democrats to keep the government functioning.
The cycle eventually caught up with him, as it is likely to do with anyone in
his position, even a Fox News regular like Jordan, Stirewalt said.
“Jim Jordan used Fox
News and the right-of-center media to great effect over the past decade to
force his way into the conference, to force his way into leadership and create
all these pressure points,” Stirewalt said. “So after this long struggle, you hear
people saying, ‘We have to stop here. The revolution has to stop here.’ But I
don’t see why anyone feels like they have to go along now and behave
themselves.”
Marianna Sotomayor
contributed to this report.
ATTACHMENT NINE – From the New York
Times
Oprah
Floated a 2020 Presidential Ticket With Mitt Romney, Book Says
Ms. Winfrey wanted to
form the independent ticket to stop Donald J. Trump, according to a forthcoming
book. Mr. Romney listened to the pitch but passed on the idea, the biography
says.
By Michael Levenson Oct. 16, 2023
Concerned that the
Democratic field wasn’t up to the task of stopping President Donald J. Trump in
2020, Oprah Winfrey pitched Mitt Romney on the idea of running for president as
an independent, with her as his running mate, according to a forthcoming
biography of the Republican senator from Utah.
Ms. Winfrey floated
the unusual ticket in a phone call she placed to Mr. Romney’s wife, Ann Romney,
in November 2019, according to an excerpt from the book, “Romney: A Reckoning,”
that was shared with The New York Times.
Mr. Romney at least
listened to the idea. (It was Oprah calling, after all.) He “heard the pitch,
and told her he was flattered, but that he’d have to pass,” the author, McKay
Coppins of The Atlantic, writes.
Liz Johnson, an aide
to Mr. Romney, declined to comment on Monday. A spokeswoman for Ms. Winfrey
said in a statement that she had urged Mr. Romney to run, but not with her.
“In November 2019, Ms. Winfrey called Senator
Romney to encourage him to run on an independent ticket,” the statement said.
“She was not calling to be part of the ticket and was never considering running
herself.”
Mr. Coppins’s book was
based on hours of interviews with Mr. Romney, as well as emails, texts and
journals that the senator had been saving to potentially write a memoir.
Realizing he could not be objective about himself, Mr. Romney has said he chose
to have a journalist write about him instead.
Ms. Winfrey’s interest
in forming an independent ticket with Mr. Romney, which was reported on Monday by
Axios, is among several dishy items from
the book, which is to be released on Oct. 24.
She has known the
Romneys since 2012, when she interviewed them at
their lakeside home in New Hampshire as Mr. Romney was running for president.
Ms. Winfrey had also seen Ms. Romney at various social events, and was
“especially fond” of her, according to the book.
On the phone with Ms.
Romney, Ms. Winfrey explained that Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City
mayor, was preparing to enter the race and had approached her about joining his
ticket. Before she decided, she wanted to gauge Mr. Romney’s interest.
She doubted that
Joseph R. Biden Jr. or Pete Buttigieg could beat Mr. Trump and was “certain”
that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts could not, according to the
book.
Ms. Romney responded
that her husband would not run for president in 2020, either as a Republican or
as an independent, Mr. Coppins writes. Mr. Romney also politely batted down the
idea, according to the book.
An aide to Mr.
Bloomberg declined to comment.
Ms. Winfrey has at
times been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate herself.
In 2018, after she
delivered a rousing speech at the Golden Globes, some were clamoring for
her to run. But she told “60 Minutes Overtime”
that she would not become a candidate in 2020 even though “I had a lot of
wealthy men calling, telling me that they would run my campaign and raise $1
billion for me.”
“I am actually humbled
by the fact that people think that I could be a leader of the free world, but
it’s just not in my spirit,” she said. “It’s not in my DNA.”
Mr. Romney, 76, recently
announced that he would not seek
re-election in 2024, saying he wanted to make way for a “new
generation of leaders.” He strongly suggested that Mr. Trump and President
Biden should also bow out, arguing that neither was effectively leading his
party to confront the “critical challenges” the nation faces.
ATTACHMENT TEN – From Politico
From Dolly Parton to
John Roberts: 19 Ideas for a Unity Speaker Pick
House speaker picks from the Supreme Court to the
football field.
Every House speaker in history has been a U.S.
Representative, but all the Constitution says is that “The House of
Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have
the sole Power of Impeachment.”
By POLITICO
MAGAZINE 01/07/2023 07:00 AM EST
With the House of Representatives in chaos this week
and only now able to finally decide on a speaker, a particularly Washingtonian
parlor game had gotten underway as politics watchers fantasized about outside
candidates who might somehow steer the legislature out of its morass.
It turns out that the House speaker doesn’t actually
have to be an elected member of Congress — every House speaker in history has
been a U.S. Representative, but all the Constitution says is that “The House of
Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have
the sole Power of Impeachment.” And while there’s no indication of some
critical mass of Democrats and Republicans longing for an outsider to lead them
to the promised land of problem solving, that hasn’t stopped people in the
politics industry from dreaming. Names of relatively moderate recently departed
GOP members like former Michigan Rep. Fred Upton have been bandied about. No
Labels, a pro-bipartisanship organization based in D.C., has even published
a list of potential speakers, one that features superannuated aisle-crossers
types like former Independent Senator Joe Lieberman and former Republican
Senator Bob Corker.
So long as we’re playing fantasy football, why stop
there? Who would you pick who could conceivably command 218 votes from across
the spectrum and then prove able to navigate looming crises like the debt
ceiling? We asked colleagues and contributors for nominees — from the
conventional to the outlandish. Here are some of their picks.
Brian Fitzpatrick
REPUBLICAN U.S.
REPRESENTATIVE FOR PENNSYLVANIA
In terms of parliamentary intrigue, it’s the simplest
scenario: Get a (relatively) moderate Republican who can bring a half-dozen
votes with him, organize the House around getting a few essential things done
and then enjoy the accolades from the Beltway establishment — because they’re
all you’ve got left now that you’ve committed GOP suicide. Unfortunately, that
last bit tends to trip up most ambitious sitting pols. But should it? Back in
the closely divided legislature of Fitzpatrick’s home state this month, an
independent-minded Democrat rode a GOP nomination to the speaker’s job. Maybe
the spectacle could inspire Fitzpatrick, who represents a purple district
outside Philadelphia. —Michael Schaffer, senior editor at POLITICO
Mark Amodei
REPUBLICAN U.S. REPRESENTATIVE
FOR NEVADA
Nevada Rep. Mark Amodei is the perfect choice. He has
been in the House since 2011, so he has the experience. He has been there a lot
longer than Kevin Hern! Few can match Amodei’s credentials: He’s from a swing
state. He’s whip-smart. And he’s funny as hell, which that body sorely needs.
What’s more, his legendary circumlocutions will make all factions think he is
one of them. Oh, and one more thing: If he decides to run for the Senate in
’24, all of the other ambitious caucus members will only have to wait a couple
of years. —Jon Ralston, CEO of the Nevada Independent
Rep. James Clyburn
DEMOCRATIC FORMER
HOUSE WHIP
Despite Freedom Caucus supporters banning Black history in schools, the House Freedom
Caucus demagogued Black history, invoking Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick
Douglass, to nominate under-experienced Rep. Byron Donald (R-Fl) for speaker.
But based on a serious reading of GOP history and Black history, I would
nominate former House Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC). After all, the first
African American to be seated in Congress and the first to preside over the
House was another Black South Carolinian, the Republican and Reconstruction era
congressman, Joseph H. Rainey. Rainey was a Jack Kemp Republican a half century
before Kemp was born — pro-economic opportunity, pro-education and pro-civil
rights. Similarly, Clyburn is bipartisan, pro-economic opportunity,
pro-education and pro-civil rights. Rainey and Clyburn were effective. Since no
Black Congressional Republicans are yet qualified and no other Republicans seem
willing, why not a qualified Southern Black Democrat who can actually work with
Republicans? Clyburn is more qualified and less hated than any candidate
the Freedom Caucus can think of or blurt into a microphone. If the Freedom
Caucus has enough sense to namecheck Black history, they can learn from it as
well. —Cornell William Brooks, professor at the Harvard Kennedy School
and former president of the NAACP
How about everyone?
How about everyone?
When the Israeli elections don’t produce a clear
winner, occasionally the only way a coalition government can be formed is for two
parties to take turns serving as prime minister. Such a rotation government is
presently in place in Ireland. Today’s House appears to be in a similar predicament.
Republicans nominally have a thin majority but internal divisions are denying
them a working majority. Why not give the various factions of the House, in
both parties, a turn with the gavel over the course of the next two years?
Kevin McCarthy has dubbed his conference factions the “Five Families,” so let’s take one from each: Kevin Hern,
chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee; Dusty Johnson, chair
of the pragmatic Republican Main Street Caucus; Dave Joyce, chair of the
pragmatic Republican Governance Group; Brian Fitzpatrick, co-chair of the
bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus; and Lauren Boebert of the loosely
organized far-right House Freedom Caucus. Since the House has a bare Republican
majority, let’s give Democrats four: Pramila Jayapal, chair of
the Congressional Progressive Caucus; Ed Case, chair of the budget-minded
Blue Dog Coalition; Annie Kuster, chair of the business-oriented New
Democrat Coalition; and Ilhan Omar of the unofficial left-wing Squad.
Each speaker would get roughly 80 days with the gavel. Let’s just try to time
it so Boebert doesn’t have it when we reach the deadline to raise the debt
limit. —Bill Scher, podcaster and POLITICO Magazine contributing writer
Liz Cheney
REPUBLICAN FORMER REP.
FOR WYOMING
She may no longer be a member of the House of
Representatives, but she will go down in history as a patriot to her nation.
Liz Cheney would be the perfect consensus choice for speaker. She is a
conservative Republican. She hails from a very conservative Republican family.
Her father, of course, has been one of the nation’s most powerful and
conservative vice presidents and secretaries of Defense. She is someone that
Democrats can trust to keep her word. And she is conservative enough that the
Freedom Caucus and others can trust her political and policy leanings. Although
she will never be the choice of the MAGA Republicans in the House, she would be
my choice as a “never Trumper” lifelong moderate Republican. She and I do not
align on civil rights or voting rights issues, but I trust her to put America
and our founding ideals first. God knows we need that now more than ever. —Sophia
A. Nelson, contributing editor at thegrio.com
Dick Cheney
REPUBLICAN FORMER VICE
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
So long as we’re talking Cheneys, why not go back to
the Old Original, who after all learned to count votes during his stint as
minority whip back in the 1980s? The family’s outspokenness about January 6
would pry loose a certain number of Democratic votes. But I suspect he’d be
able to corral a critical mass of Republican votes even in today’s GOP, for one
simple reason: The idea of naming the second-worst pol they can
think of would make the online left scream bloody murder — and in the
enemy-of-my-enemy culture of modern politics, that would be enough to secure
him a bunch of MAGA support. (By the way, he’s still younger than Nancy
Pelosi.) —Michael Schaffer, senior editor at POLITICO
Trent Lott
FORMER SENATE MINORITY
LEADER
Bring back Trent. He’s only 81, and that’s late middle
age for our current geriatric governing class. He was never particularly
anti-Trump so he’s palatable to the far right. He’s always worked well with
Blue Dog Dems and has spent his post Senate career paired with moderate
Democratic Senator John Breaux raking in retainers as lobbyists. Breaux and other
members — including more Democrats — who served with Lott would certainly
unleash the mother of all whip counts to corral votes. In fact, one can bet
that almost all former members — from both sides of the aisle — who now feed
from the influence peddling trough would call in chits to put Lott in the
speakership. Lott knows how to do business in this town and could run a
functioning session that would focus on legislating; moving consensus bills
that would emasculate the crazies on both sides of the aisle. I bet Senators
Schumer and McConnell would like this idea best of all. —Juleanna Glover,
CEO of Ridgely|Walsh
John Boehner
REPUBLICAN FORMER
SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE
If I were advising the pro-McCarthy crowd, I would
suggest they bring back Boehner. He knows how to do the job and offers them a
solid conservative on policy and a brushback pitch at the rebels. For
Democrats, they get an institutionalist who believes government should
function, and he’s minced no words about extremists and idiots in his own party.
He could bring back bourbon bipartisanship and knows how to work with the
Senate. Typically, a speaker needs ironclad control over their caucus, but, in
a Coalition scenario, that role rests with the two party leaders. His lack of
interest in future office could also help leaders in both parties feel
comfortable handing him the gavel, at least in this imaginary political
world. —Tom Perriello, executive director of Open Society-U.S. and
former U.S. Rep. for Virginia
Newt Gingrich
REPUBLICAN FORMER SPEAKER
OF THE HOUSE
He’s already done the job. He’s got street cred with
backbench rebels, having been one himself. And he’d be happy to only serve as a
caretaker before returning to his books, his podcast and his frequent Roman
holidays. Newt Gingrich, as a former member, has floor privileges. He still
spends lots of time in the D.C. area, so the commute wouldn’t be bad. And at
79, nearly a quarter-century on from his resignation in the face of what he
called “cannibalism” in his conference, he’s as full of energy and ideas as he
was in 1978, when he finally won on what was his third consecutive run for
Congress. When I spoke to him this week for a column of my own, and mentioned
that there was a good book to be done on the history of the GOP beginning when he
and Dick Cheney were first elected that year, he quickly agreed. “And if you do
it I’ll cooperate,” he offered. But perhaps there’s one final chapter to be
written? —Jonathan Martin, politics bureau chief and a senior political
columnist at POLITICO
Major General William
Walker
SERGEANT AT ARMS OF
THE HOUSE
It would be a classic fish out of water movie scenario
— everybody throws their hat into the ring, his name gets put in by mistake,
and then he gets it. The person you least expect. Of course, he then turns out
to be the single most competent person because he knows how everybody operates.
He’s been watching and studying every House member every day, quietly, and
knows exactly how to press their buttons. It would be genius. —Eric
Easter, writer, producer, CEO of BlackBox Digital Studios
Cheryl Johnson
CLERK OF THE HOUSE
In the midst of the
shitshow in the House since noon on January 3, there has been one bright spot:
Cheryl Johnson, the nonpartisan Clerk of the House, has presided over the body
with dignity, intelligence and firmness. She knows all the members, knows the
rules (even if they are not operating under the usual process, since they have
no rules) and has been impeccably fair. No representative-elect, from either
party or any faction, has criticized her. If we followed the Westminster model,
with a nonpartisan speaker, which has worked well in parliamentary bodies like
the British House of Commons, she would be the perfect choice. —Norman Ornstein,
emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributing editor
for the Atlantic
John Roberts
CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE
UNITED STATES
Back in the 19th century, when speakership elections regularly
went into multiple ballots, jumping from the judicial branch into politics
wasn’t abnormal. Since Roberts clearly isn’t having much fun as chief justice,
why not bring back the idea? In the Aaron Sorkin movie, the music would swell
as the old jurist entered the fray on behalf of unity. In real life, Democrats
would like it because it would open up a SCOTUS seat. Mainstream Republicans
would like it because, as nearly two decades of jurisprudence shows, the man is
a conservative. And even the MAGA radicals might go along because, for all of
his solemnity about institutional stewardship, Roberts has proven he’s not
exactly good at reining in his own polarized organization’s extremist bloc. —Michael
Schaffer, senior editor at POLITICO
Eric Adams
DEMOCRATIC MAYOR OF
NEW YORK
I know what you’re thinking: Why would House
Republicans pick the leader of America’s bluest city? Sure, Adams is
technically a Democrat, but these days, the Big Apple’s mayor is practically
indistinguishable from the GOPers in Congress. In recent weeks, Adams has
been ginning up panic about the influx of migrants into New
York City, doubling down on his tough-on-crime messaging and picking fights with his progressive predecessor Bill
DeBlasio. From Adams’ perspective, the speaker gig would almost certainly seem
like an upgrade, considering his rapidly declining support among New York
Democrats. At the very least, the House of Representatives isn’t crawling with rats. —Ian Ward, contributing writer,
POLITICO Magazine
Stacey Abrams
DEMOCRATIC FORMER
GEORGIA STATE REPRESENTATIVE
It seems to me there is an opportunity here to get a
smart quarterback who can get the job done. She saved democracy before, and
though she didn’t get enough credit, it is undeniable that she has continued to
learn the hard-won lessons of democracy through the difficult trials of
politics. I feel confident that she can take her experiences and metabolize
them into wisdom to serve and lead the House. Yes, the GOP will raise a fuss
because she’s a Democrat, but gosh, maybe a few sensible GOP members may do the
right thing and vote for someone who knows how to make deals for the greater
good. Have they realized that this nonsense is not good for the economy? Of
course, it doesn’t hurt that she writes fiction. Novelists study human
motivation and organizational behavior for a living; so, yeah, Ms. Abrams is my
choice of speaker of the House. —Min Jin Lee, author of the
novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a
National Book Award finalist
Boris Johnson
FORMER PRIME MINISTER
OF THE UNITED KINGDOM
“Hasta la vista, baby” were Boris Johnson’s final
words from the dispatch box in the House of Commons upon stepping down as prime
minister last fall, so he already has the right pop-culture allusions to make
the jump from London to Washington. Johnson’s three years on Downing Street produced
something for nearly every faction in Congress. The right-wing rebels opposed
to McCarthy will revere Johnson, hounded from office for hosting parties during
lockdown, as a martyr of the Covid culture wars. Mainstream conservatives and
Democrats will be reassured by his dedication to supporting Ukraine’s cause.
The Squad might recognize their only chance to get a House leader unabashedly
supporting of single-payer healthcare. Speaker Johnson could also deliver on
the one procedural change everyone should want: a weekly Question Time where
party leaders have to defend themselves against opponents. Johnson was born in
New York; if he can wrangle back the U.S. citizenship he renounced in 2017, he
could even find himself in the line of presidential succession. —Sasha
Issenberg, journalist, Washington correspondent for Monocle
Naftali Bennett and
Yair Lapid
FORMER PRIME MINISTERS
OF ISRAEL
An incoherent political coalition, a raucous
legislative chamber, a pile of urgent business and no room for error: the next
speaker of the House faces a set of challenges that might break any political
leader. Or at least, any individual American political leader. But the task
that has so far confounded Kevin McCarthy might be a rather less bewildering
one for the duo that just finished a stint running Israel in an ungainly
political alliance. Sharing the prime minister’s post, the right-wing Bennett
and center-left Lapid managed a set of ideologically and culturally diverse
partners that make the GOP’s mismatched factions look like a comparatively
simple organizational puzzle. Recruiting two foreigners to do a job typically
held by one American would be unconventional, of course. But importing skilled
labor is an American tradition and Lapid and Bennett’s record matches the moment.
Under their watch, Israel did not breach its basic fiscal obligations or
experience a national security emergency brought on by government dysfunction —
a bar no current candidate for the speakership is certain to clear. Sure, their
government lasted only 18 months, but who among the conventional prospects for
speaker looks likely to last even that long? —Alexander Burns, POLITICO
associate editor for global politics
Betty Boothroyd
FORMER SPEAKER OF THE
U.K. HOUSE OF COMMONS
If the House is looking for a new speaker, the
solution is right in front of their noses — and just across the Atlantic Ocean.
There, in the sceptered isle of Great Britain, sits someone who needs no
training, no learning curve; she’s already been speaker, presiding over a body
even more contentious than ours, with a firm hand and an intimidating voice.
For eight years, Betty Boothroyd of Yorkshire was speaker of the House of
Commons, having come to Parliament not through the musty halls of Eton, Harrow,
Oxford or Cambridge, but from local council schools and the Dewsbury College of
Commerce and Art. Her early work was not as a hedge fund master of the
universe, but as a dancer. For most of her later life she worked for British
politicians, but before anyone plays the ”foreigner!” card, she also has U.S.
political credentials — and bipartisan ones at that. She worked in JFK’s 1960
campaign and spent two years in the Congress, working as a legislative aide to
Republican Rep. Silvio Conte. Most important, her work as speaker reflected two
crucial assets: First, as the post over there entails, she was essentially
non-partisan, playing little if any role in advancing a party’s agenda. Second,
she was a fearsome figure in Parliament; anyone who ever watched the
proceedings will remember her stentorian “Order! Order!” that would still the
clamor of debate. OK, she’s 93 — but that’s only a handful of years older than
Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein. Is she still a Brit? Well, if you don’t
have to be a member of the House to serve, where is it written that you have to
be a citizen? —Jeff Greenfield, television journalist and author
Tom Brady
QUARTERBACK FOR THE
TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS
Why not the GOAT? Tom Brady’s prowess on the gridiron
may be faltering, but he should grab the opportunity to show that he can
deliver the goods on a different field of battle. A proven leader who has come
from behind time after time to lead his troops to victory, Brady could easily
master the skills needed to wield the House speaker’s gavel. Learning the House
rulebook would be a cinch compared to studying a playbook. He’s already learned
how to deal with authoritarian temperaments by working under New England coach
Bill Belichick for several decades. And he leans right. He’s played golf with
Donald Trump, served as a judge at the 2002 Miss USA pageant and kept a Make
America Great Again hat in his locker in New England in 2015. More recently,
he’s started to distance himself from Trump, demonstrating his political
acumen. As it stares at a self-inflicted loss, the Republican Party needs a
Hail Mary pass and only Brady can provide it. —Jacob Heilbrunn, editor
of the National Interest
Dolly Parton
MUSIC ICON
Dolly Parton has everything you could want in a
speaker — not just the bio as a self-made multimillionaire from humble
beginnings (who, swoon, would be even richer if not for her prolific philanthropy). And who better to lead one of America’s
most-disliked institutions than one of its least-disliked people? She’s an icon as much for the gay community as for the
religious right. Jad Abumrad, a co-host of the podcast “Dolly Parton’s
America,” has described the crowd at a Dolly concert as “groups of people that
we think shouldn’t get along, but there they are, standing side by side …
singing the same song.” Wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing to have in the House
the next time debt-ceiling talks come around? Plus she would bring legendary
productivity (if she can write the super-hits “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love
You” in the same day, she can sure as hell get a budget passed on time); a
connection to the concerns of everyday Americans (see: “It’s a rich man’s game
/ No matter what they call it / And you spend your life / Putting money in his
wallet”); and a genius for taking smart bets (in April 2020, she threw a million a million at research that helped make
the Moderna Covid vaccine — a month before Operation Warp Speed formed). And to
those who say she lacks the requisite political background … I mean, she runs
a theme park.
She has lots of experience with clown shows. -Kathy Gilsinan,
contributing writer, POLITICO Magazine
ATTACHMENT ELEVEN - From the Federalist
Nancy
Pelosi And Dolly Parton Are Both Praying For The President
BY: EMILY
JASHINSKY DECEMBER 06, 2019
There’s a lot to enjoy
in WNYC’s “Dolly Parton’s America” podcast, including candid new interviews
with Parton herself. One of those conversations generated a moment of
particular interest given House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) outburst at
James Rosen on Thursday morning.
Asked by Rosen whether
she hates President Trump, Pelosi invoked her faith. “As a Catholic,” she told the
reporter after some back and forth, “I resent you using the word ‘hate’ in a
sentence that addresses me… I was raised in a way that’s a heart full of love,
and always pray for the president. And I still pray for the president. I pray
for the president all the time. So don’t mess with me when it comes to words
like that.”
Back to “Dolly
Parton’s America.” In a Nov. 12 episode, host Jad
Abumrad asked Parton to revisit the 2017 Emmy Awards, when Jane Fonda and Lily
Tomlin attacked Trump
while on with their notoriously neutral co-star. Pressed about what she thought
while it was happening by producer Shima Oliaee, Parton revealed what she
ultimately decided not to say on air. “I wanted to say ‘Let’s pray for the
president, why don’t we pray for the president? If we’re having all these
problems, let’s just, you know, why don’t we pray for Mr. President?”
“I have to be honest,
that moment messed me up,” a narration from Abumrad interjects. He
continued:
I kept thinking about,
you know I came in thinking that her refusal to talk about Trump was probably
mostly a business calculation, I mean she has a lot that she needs to protect
including a massive charitable foundation, so I think we can all get that. But
it’s also easy to see that silence cynically, like a refusal to speak truth
just because it might hurt the bottom line. But when she said let’s pray for
the president, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I just thought, oh no, no,
no, that’s not all that’s happening here.
Throughout their
conversations, Parton defended her firm belief in maintaining partisan neutrality
as an entertainer. Abumrad was skeptical, confused by her history of lending
support to various social causes over the years, but silence on Trump.
“The Trump comment
made me realize, ‘Oh I get it, she’s saying her stake in the sand is that she will
not cast anybody out,'” he mused, reflecting on Parton’s “9 to 5”-era defenses
of Jane Fonda, and her refusal to “flatten” Porter Wagoner into a stereotypical
misogynist. “It seemed suddenly clear to me that, yes, while there is a
business logic here, this is also a spiritual stance, this is an ethos that she
has chosen. And it is undeniably one of the reasons that she can have the fan
base that she has, because everyone feels safe at a Dolly Parton concert.”
I couldn’t help but be
amused by Abumrad’s realization. Is it so confusing that Parton’s faith would
sincerely inform her reluctance to alienate fans on either side of the Trump
divide? Why did Parton, an outspoken Christian of five decades, have to prove
that?
In total fairness,
Abumrad and company try to bring a sense of class and regional consciousness to
their project, and the podcast is great. It was still interesting to see how
Parton’s faith-based self-defense sent him reeling, dispelling the cynical
assumption that she stays silent on Trump for financial reasons.
I’ll extend the same
benefit of the doubt to Pelosi, who actually returned to the podium to answer
Rosen’s question. The response made headlines, perhaps reasonably so given the
barbs she’s traded with Trump over the years, and religion’s declining
centrality in our daily lives.
In the cases of both
Pelosi and Parton, it seems the Trump element is what heightened the impact of
their remarks. It’s all a reminder that we have work to do at normalizing
ordinary Christian behavior, like praying for the president, whether you agree
with him or not.
ATTACHMENT TWELVE – From the Independent UK
Dolly
Parton’s politics hide in plain sight, whether she admits it or not
There’s not much room
for ambiguity in our times, as some Hollywood stars have found out, yet
Parton’s philanthropy, which includes her funding of a Covid-19 vaccine, means
she gets a free pass. But it’s easy to read between the lines, says Adam
White.
Dolly Parton probably
isn’t Jesus, but the jury’s still out. She emerged from Tennessee’s Smoky
Mountains wearing a coat of many colours, and through her songcraft and earnest
sense of goodness, she has become a rare unifier among global chaos. Her
lyrics, which burst with memories, traumas and wit, continue to touch those
from every walk of life, Parton resonating with young and old and every colour
and creed. Her philanthropy has helped teach children to read, and funded Covid-19 vaccines. At the same time, Parton has sat on
the fence politically, refusing to align with nor condemn any particular
ideology or US president, while insisting that it’s the key to her longevity.
It’s a bit more complex than that.
Many have tried and
failed to get Parton to open up about her political leanings over the years.
It’s a game only made trickier by her skills at deflection, whether by
deploying a canny topic pivot or, more commonly, a joke about her breasts. “I
don’t do politics,” she told the acclaimed biographical podcast Dolly
Parton’s America in 2019. “I have too many fans on both
sides of the fence. Of course, I have my opinion, but I learned years ago to
keep my mouth shut about things.”
It’s not just an
increasingly polarised electorate that’s inspired all those questions, though.
Parton is a hodgepodge of left-wing and right-wing signifiers, a red state icon
who refused to critique Donald Trump, and who also happens to express love
and adoration for every gender, sexuality and colour imaginable. Dolly
Parton’s Christmas on the Square, her new Netflix film, is a testament to
her occasionally jarring bipartisanship. It is thick with God-fearing
spirituality and occasionally creepy nostalgia for small town Americana, but it
is also hyper-queer in execution – think It’s a Wonderful Life if
directed by Divine. Parton appears early on as a heavily made-up bag lady
carrying a box of change and her rags fashioned into a glamorous shawl, while
the film casts veritable gay icon Christine Baranski as an immaculately coiffed
festive grinch. Enough said.
That kind of shapeshifting,
or Parton’s ability to be exactly what you want her to be, depending on the
angle, is why she is as beloved as she is. It’s also why she provokes such
confusion. In Dolly Parton’s America, host Jad Abumrad repeatedly
questioned Parton’s limp stances on feminism and right-wing boogeymen. He
recalled her visible discomfort at a joke made at Trump’s expense at the 2017
Emmys, in which her Nine to Five co-stars Jane
Fonda and Lily Tomlin repurposed a line from the film to condemn the
then-president. Parton, on stage with the pair, pointedly stayed quiet, then
made a quip about her boobs. In another episode of the podcast, Parton bristled
when asked if she identified as a feminist. “I don’t believe in crucifying a
whole group just because a few people have made mistakes,” she told Abumbrad.
“The word ‘feminist’ is like ‘I hate all men’.”
The way Parton tells
it is that, first and foremost, she is a businesswoman. Just glance at her
biography, and that is clear. Parton is one of country music’s most prolific
crossover artists, and only became embraced the world over after putting the
work in. It was her choice to move into a more chart-friendly direction,
shifting elegantly between pop, country and bluegrass since the Seventies, just
as Nine to Five was a calculated move to broaden her
mainstream visibility. Discussing politics, particularly for an act whose
earliest fame came within the conservative world of Sixties Nashville, would
have potentially dented her bottom line long ago.
“I’ve seen things
before, like the Dixie Chicks,” Parton told The Guardian in 2019, referencing
the hysterical backlash the country trio endured after
condemning the Iraq War in 2003. “You can ruin a career for speaking out … Of course,
I have my own opinions, but that don’t mean I got to throw them out there,
because you’re going to piss off half the people.”
That was the old way
of doing things, though. In 2020, on the heels of a catastrophic Republican
presidency and a summer of international protest over systemic racism and
police brutality, being apolitical in the public eye is no longer a desired
approach to stardom. More and more, it’s considered a hindrance. Taylor Swift
faced a significant backlash for keeping mum on her politics amid the 2016
election, later expressing regret at not publicly declaring her Democratic
values and opposition to Trump. Like Parton, she alluded to the treatment of
Dixie Chicks in 2003 as the reason for her silence.
The Guardians
of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt’s increasingly unpopular status on social media is directly
linked to his political ambiguity, while the controversy swirling around Ellen
DeGeneres this summer was at least partly inspired by her eagerness to pal around with George W Bush.
Even a one-time figure of shiny, apolitical blandness like Jennifer Aniston has
become outspokenly political in recent months: supporting Black Lives
Matter, and chastising Covid conspirators and those voting for Kanye West
instead of Joe Biden in the presidential election. Open signalling of
your values, and using your A-list privilege for political good, has become a
fundamental part of modern celebrity branding.
Parton has yet to
submit. It means many of her modern interviews are slightly awkward, Parton
talking around matters of importance and sticking to an admittedly anodyne
script of wishing everyone well and calling for unity. But that she hasn’t been
condemned for it speaks to something deeper than what Parton actually
articulates. Parton hasn’t called for Trump’s head, nor got behind figures in
the Democratic Party in comparison – instead she has signalled her values with
actions rather than dialogue. It helps explain why there hasn’t been as much of
an anxious urge from many of her left-wing fans to have her speak out, even if
interviewers continue to grill her over it.
Glance at Parton’s
choices over the years and there’s a sense that we already know where her heart
lies. Whether she likes the word or not, Parton’s feminist credentials are
clear, from her shattering of the “dumb blonde” stereotypes that led her to
early mockery (“This dumb blonde is nobody’s fool,” she sang on the opening
track of her debut album in 1966), to her pioneering fights to maintain
ownership of her music and lyrics. She has donated millions to Aids research and
was an early advocate for gay marriage and trans rights, and has also used her
incredible wealth to give back. Dollywood, her official theme park, is the
largest employer in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, near where she was born, and it
has pumped millions into the local economy.
Through her
Imagination Library charity, more than 100 million books have been sent in the
post to hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five in countries
worldwide. This year she donated a million dollars to research into a vaccine
for Covid-19 – a pandemic that was made incredibly political by right-wing
figures who believed it was, depending on the week, relatively harmless or a
communist hoax.
In August, Parton
told Billboard magazine that she
supported Black Lives Matter (“Do we think our little white asses are the only
ones that matter?” she asked). In 2018, she removed the use of the word “Dixie”
from an attraction at Dollywood citing its confederate origins. “As soon as you
realise that [something] is a problem, you fix it,” Parton explained. “Don’t be
a dumbass. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on
purpose.”
Parton’s politics
don’t exist in binaries, of a kind we’ve become accustomed to. She is not a
Democrat, nor a Republican, but a representative of something else entirely – a
Dolly party, if you will. Her politics are based on what is just or right,
rooted in compassion, the sharing of wealth, and helping wherever help is
needed. If you think about it, her values are far removed from not only
traditional Republicanism but also Trumpism and even Biden and Kamala Harris. Parton appears to have far more in common with
the progressive left than any other political ideology.
The mysteries that
surround Parton are an important part of her legend: the husband that no one
has ever seen; the tattoos covering her body that may or may not exist; whether
or not she actually did secretly produce Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her
politics have often been mentioned alongside all of the above, just another
ambiguous element to the Parton we all know and love. In truth, though, they’re
probably the most unambiguous thing about her, as fundamental and obvious to
the Dolly Parton story as the chest she’s always poking fun at. For someone who
regularly claims that she doesn’t “do” politics, Dolly Parton is more political
than most.
ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN – From Showbiz Cheat Sheet
Why
Dolly Parton Chooses to Stay Out of Politics
Dolly Parton stays out of politics (mostly). Here's
why, and some examples of when she has spoken out about hot-button issues.
by KELSEY
GOERES published on March
29, 2021
Dolly Parton has been famously
apolitical for the entirety of her lengthy, successful career. She’s even
turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom to
avoid getting political. Her decision to stay neutral has something to do with
the fact that she has fans on both ends of the political spectrum. But it also
has something to do with her personal view on politics as a whole.
It’s no accident that
Parton avoids politics. She gets asked about the subject pretty often in
interviews. But she makes a point to, generally, take a neutral stance.
“Well, it is a choice,
because I don’t like to get involved in politics, because first of all, I have
as many Republican fans as I do Democrats,” she told USA Today in
2020. “I don’t want to offend anybody, I have a right to myself. Like God gave
us free will, America gave us free speech, but you’ve got to be responsible for
anything you say and do.”
Not only does Parton
want to avoid offending any fans, but she also has her own ideas about politics
that aren’t constrained by the confines of one political party.
“Really I’m more about
the person and about the message,” she said. “I like watching all of it. I
watch Fox News. I watch CNN. It’s like I don’t even know what to believe,
but I just watch it out of curiosity because it’s good television. Crazy,
lunacy, but I just don’t get involved. I am not political, and I refuse to get
caught up in political things. I just look at it, and I just think what I
think. I’m just saying, ‘Good Lord, what are these people doing? Crazy. They
don’t care about us.'”
Dolly Parton voices
her opinions in her songs
Though Parton may view
herself as an apolitical person, she still has opinions about hot-button
issues. She expresses those thoughts in her songwriting.
“In my songwriting,
I’ve never shied away from what is going on in the world,” she wrote in her
2020 book, Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “I don’t
voice issues publicly, myself. But in my songs, I can write about whatever I
feel. That’s what I’m about. I can say what I need to say without having to
march in the streets or make big public statements. I express in my own way
what I believe other people need to hear and might not be able to write about
their feelings.”
The Queen of Country
occasionally speaks out about certain issues
While Parton has made
a point to stay out of politics generally, she has, at times, spoken out about
certain topics. In an interview with Billboard in
2020, Parton commented on the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I understand people having to make themselves
known and felt and seen,” she said. “And of course Black lives matter. Do we
think our little white a*ses are the only ones that matter? No!”
Additionally, in an
interview with Jad Abumrad in 2019 for the Dolly Parton’s America podcast,
Parton was asked if she’d call herself a feminist.
She said no. But, after some discussion, she agreed that she’s a feminist in
practice, if not by name.
“I think that’s a good
way of saying it,” she said. “I live it. I work it. And I think there’s power
in it for me.”
ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN – From the WashPost
Dolly
Parton blasts politicians without naming any. Call it ‘Dollitics.’
By María Luisa Paúl May 17, 2023 at 7:45 p.m. EDT
During last week’s Academy of Country Music Awards, a
crowd filled with cowboy hats roared as Dolly Parton’s tent-like skirt detached
to reveal her leather outfit. It was an edgy performance in Frisco, Tex. — made
edgier by Parton’s blasting of “greedy politicians past and present.”
Like legions of musicians before her, Parton, 77, used
her new song “World on Fire” as a medium to voice her discontent with
elected officials — a sentiment widespread among Americans, regardless of their party.
“Liar, liar, the world’s on fire. Whatcha gonna do
when it all burns down?” Parton muses in the rock-infused song, criticizing how
politicians “wouldn’t know the truth if it bit ’em” and have “lost sight of
common decency, of wrong and right.”
The singer, however, stopped short at naming specific
politicians. During an interview that aired Monday, she told Today’s Jacob Soboroff that her song is about “all of ’em. Any
of ’em. I don’t think any of ’em are trying hard enough.”
“I just really think often that they worry more about
their party than they do about the people,” Parton said. “None of them are
working from the heart.”
Parton’s publicist declined to make the singer available
for an interview.
ATTACHMENT FIFTEEN – From
Vox
How
Dolly Parton became a secular American saint
Why everyone loves
Dolly now.
By Constance Grady@constancegrady Feb
26, 2021, 8:20am EST
“I’m sick of Dolly,
ain’t you?” said Dolly Parton to the New York Times Magazine in 2020.
Few people are. Dolly
Parton is in the midst of a career revival that has seen her hailed as a kind
of secular country-pop saint. And what’s not to love about Dolly?
Dolly is the living
legend who sells out arena tours in her 70s. She’s the songwriting genius who
wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same day. In recent decades,
feminists have begun to reclaim her as a feminist icon. She is an impeccably
dressed glamour queen, a business titan whose brand includes her own theme park,
a philanthropist whose literacy program has sent free books to millions of
children, and on top of all that she helped fund Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine —
and then refused to jump the line to get a dose early. She is so
beloved that WNYC devoted a full podcast series to investigating how a
single figure could be adored by both blue and red states.
Dolly Parton is, as the New York Times put it in 2019, the rare musical icon
who is able to “get her victory lap while she’s still around to bask in the
glory.”
But Parton knew what
she was talking about when she suggested to the New York Times last fall that people
were starting to get sick of her. She has now achieved the sort of hysterical
and highly trendy adoration that can shade into overexposure in the blink of an
eye — even for a legend with a reputation as durable as Dolly Parton’s. The
pressure on Dolly Parton to be the single person who can unite a fractured
America is so high, there is a slow and uneasy creep of incipient backlash all
around her.
There was the
discontent after Parton reworked her iconic “9 to 5” worker’s anthem into “5 to 9” to
honor the side hustle for a Super Bowl ad. There are the whispers about the
dinner show that used to be called Dolly’s Dixie Stampede. There is concern that the labor conditions at Dollywood aren’t ideal.
watching
Dolly Parton go from "secret feminist" to "unproblematic
fave" to "NOT a socialist, ACTUALLY" was almost worth the cost
of being on this website lol
— Madeline Leung Coleman (@madelesque) February 2, 2021
Dolly Parton is
beloved because she has devoted her career to standing for love. And, usefully,
she is willing to be ambiguous about what exactly that love means and how much
it includes people that those on different sides of the political aisle
consider their enemies. But in a post-Trump America, is Dolly Parton’s love
enough?
“If I was trying to
really impress men or be totally sexy, then I would dress differently”
Dolly Parton wasn’t
always so uncontroversially adored. She spent much of her early career
worshipped by her country base while the rest of the country treated her as a
walking boob joke, or even less than that. In her 2020 study of Parton’s
career, She Come By It Natural, Sarah Smarsh notes that in the
1970s and ’80s, during interviews with Barbara Walters and Oprah, both
interviewers “asked [Parton] to stand up so they could point out, without
humor, that she looked like a tramp.”
But in recent decades,
everything that makes Dolly Dolly has swung back into trend. “One reason Parton’s
approval rating is so high, though” Lindsay Zoladz posited in the New York Times in 2019, “is that
all the attributes that used to set her up for criticism — the outrageous,
hyper-femme style; the unapologetic business savvy needed to pull off her
late-70s pop crossover; even the so-what acknowledgment of her own cosmetic
surgery — are no longer taboo.”
Dolly Parton often
explains that she modeled her look after the town tramp, who as a small child
she thought was the most beautiful person she’d ever seen, and that she knows
straight men don’t find it attractive and doesn’t care. “If I was trying to
really impress men or be totally sexy, then I would dress differently,” she told Playboy in 1978. But why bother? “I’m already married
and he don’t mind how I look.”
For decades, this
acknowledgment played as tacky or trashy. But in the 2010s, it came to be seen
as empowering, even feminist: Dolly dresses for herself, not the male gaze. And
Dolly’s self is a celebration of the artificiality of femininity and glamour, a
finding of authenticity in what is fake. That’s downright avant-garde.
Moreover, Parton’s
hard-nosed and palpable ambition might have once been seen as cynical. But in
today’s rise-and-grind culture, they are aspirational. Dolly knows where the
money is, and she follows it. Who can fault her for that?
Parton’s 21st-century
career revival got an extra assist when she brought in internet-savvy new
management in 2004. Up to that point, she had no website and little
merchandise, and when she toured, her ticket sales were in the low thousands
per venue. Then she hired Danny Nozell, who often says in interviews that he strategically charted a new
generation of Dolly fans through a combination of targeted touring, TV
marketing, and “heavy viral advertising.” (This strategy perhaps explains the
number of really very good Dolly Parton memes out there.)
By 2006, Parton’s tours were selling out again. In 2009, she started
selling out stadiums. In 2014, she headlined the Glastonbury Festival.
So as the zeitgeist
shifted into a mode more receptive to Dolly Parton’s genius than previous
decades had been, she was prepared to meet it. The mainstream embraced Dolly
Parton, and she embraced it back.
In Come By It
Natural, Smarsh describes seeing a bunch of cynical New Yorkers live tweet
Dolly’s Pure and Simple concert tour in 2016:
“That majestic bitch just started playing a goddamn
PANFLUTE [sic],” one tweeted.
“Dolly Parton, sitting in a pew onstage, just got a
stadium full of Nyers to shout ‘Amen,’ ” said another. And then: “Nothing says
#Pride like a stadium full of gays singing ‘Here You Come Again’ with Dolly
Parton.”
Suddenly two New York acquaintances I didn’t realize
knew one another were tweeting an exchange.
“Her voice is perfect.”
“Dolly forever! Who knew she was such a storyteller?”
“About to fling myself at the stage.”
Smarsh, who grew up in
rural Kansas — Dolly country — recalls being shocked to see such earnest Dolly
Parton worship from these coastal elites. “I guess I figured that Dolly Parton
would only be loved ironically in some places,” she writes.
But Dolly Parton
forbids irony. That’s part of her magic. And for the past half-decade, coastal
America and heartland America alike have loved her fully, earnestly, and
unironically.
“Really, who could
fail to love Dolly Parton?”
To love Dolly Parton
is to love her image, which is simultaneously unchanging and evolving, over-the-top
obvious and opaque.
“There is no aura of
mystery … about Dolly Parton,” wrote Roger Ebert in 1980, as he interviewed Parton on
the 9 to 5 press tour. “What you see is what you get.”
But as the interview
continued, Ebert’s sense of who Dolly was shifted. She seemed perfectly
authentic, but also somehow fictional. “She speaks in that cornball Southern
accent, but with perfect clarity and timing, so that she isn’t just answering a
question, she’s presenting a character, she’s onstage,” he wrote. “A fascinating phenomenon took place among the
journalists at the table. Only moments ago, they were asking routine questions.
Now they’d been enlisted as part of the act. They were falling into the rhythm
of the performance, feeding her straight lines.”
Parton’s sense of the
character she was playing was so strong that everyone else had to play along,
too. What else do you do when faced with Dolly Parton?
DOLLY PARTON FORBIDS
IRONY. THAT’S PART OF HER MAGIC.
It’s not that she’s
doing “Dolly Parton” as a bit, exactly. Dolly exudes authenticity. But she does
seem to have a clear sense that when wielded strategically, her outrageous
public persona can offer plenty of cover to shelter behind.
This contradiction is
part of the dance Parton has done throughout her career. She shows up in her
teased wigs and plunging necklines, makes a boob joke before anyone else can
make it (“Now that we’ve got that off our chest!” is a recurring Dolly-ism),
and appears to be entirely straightforward and understandable. It’s only after
she’s done talking that you realize how much she’s successfully hidden away.
For example: her
husband Carl Thomas Dean, to whom she’s been married since 1966 and who is
almost never photographed in public. Her political beliefs, which, outside of a
vocal support for LGBTQ rights, remain a mystery (she will not discuss Trump).
Her private life.
“Her physical
appearance has always seemed to me like a metaphor for her actual
person,” wrote Hadley Freeman in the Guardian in 2019: “she gives a lot
of good — and distracting — front, but the reality is definitely obscured.”
In the absence of
reality, rumors flourish: that Parton’s arms are secretly covered in tattoos. That no one has ever seen her real hair. But as reality remains unknowable, Parton keeps
finding new and fascinating angles in her elaborate star image for the public
to play with.
“She doesn’t reinvent
herself but instead periodically turns her prismatic image so that it reflects
a different light,” argued the New York Times Magazine in 2020. At the time, the
part of Dolly’s identity that was most in the light was her work as a
songwriter, which is why you probably heard often last year that she wrote “I
Will Always Love You” and “Jolene” in the same day. This year, with Covid-19
vaccines all over the news, it’s her work as a philanthropist that is most
often in the headlines.
And as Parton’s image
shifts, there’s one idea that keeps glittering at the center of her star, almost
as constant as her stylized femininity. Throughout her career, in profile after
profile, people who talk to Dolly Parton come away talking about an aura of
love that surrounds her. This aura is, perhaps, the visceral sense that Parton
is being entirely honest when she says, as she often does, that she “loves everybody and wants
everybody to love me.”
In 2008, Roger Ebert returned to his 1980 Dolly Parton profile, noting
that it had missed something he considered very important: her presence, which
he writes “enveloped” him. “This had nothing to do with sex appeal,” he says.
“Far from it. It was as if I were being mesmerized by a benevolent power. I
left the room in a cloud of good feeling.”
Ebert adds that when
he spoke with his writing partner Gene Siskel about Parton the next day, Siskel
reported the same feeling: “This will sound crazy,” he said, “but when I was
interviewing Dolly Parton, I almost felt like she had healing powers.”
“Really, who could
fail to love Dolly Parton?” mused the Guardian in 2011. “Well, aside from the Ku Klux Klan
who, as if to confirm that it had a combined IQ in the single digits, has held
demonstrations at Parton’s theme park, the inevitably named Dollywood, because
of her annual Gay Day.”
“I say this with
humility and as someone who is not a believer,” Dolly Parton’s America host Jad Abumrad told
Billboard in 2019: “There’s something very Christ-like about her.”
But America in the
21st century is no time for a secular pop saint. And there’s a dark side to
Dolly’s ability to appeal, Christ-like, to all people at all times.
“I don’t want to
offend anybody. This is a business.”
The first suggestion
of a Trump-era backlash to Dolly Parton came in 2017, with the tale of the
attraction that was then called Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede.
“Advertised as an
‘extraordinary dinner show … pitting North against South in a friendly and fun
rivalry [link removed],’ Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede is the Lost Cause of the
Confederacy meets Cirque du Soleil,” wrote Aisha Harris in a viral article for Slate. “It’s a
lily-white kitsch extravaganza that play-acts the Civil War but never once
mentions slavery.”
In the Dixie Stampede,
racing piglets named Robert E. Lee and Scarlett O’Hara faced off against
piglets named Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, while the cheering audience
was instructed to pick a side. The bathrooms featured a white sign on one door
saying “Southerners Only” and a black sign on the other saying “Northerners
Only.”
“This was, at best,
horrifyingly tone-deaf,” Harris concluded.
Shortly after Harris’s
article came out, the attraction changed. While the retitled “Dolly Parton’s Stampede”
continues to market itself as a rivalry between North and South, it no longer
includes references to the Civil War, and its antebellum nostalgia has been
transformed into Gilded Age nostalgia. The restrooms now have a kitschy cowboy
theme. (A “history” lesson involving magical Indigenous people, however, remains.)
“There’s such a thing
as innocent ignorance, and so many of us are guilty of that,” Parton said to Billboard of the controversy in 2020. “When
they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to
offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede.’ As soon
as you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a
dumbass. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on
purpose.”
Parton was speaking to
Billboard in July 2020 as the country was engulfed in protests following the
police killing of George Floyd. The interviewer asked her what she thought of
the movement.
“I understand people
having to make themselves known and felt and seen,” Parton said. “And of course
Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that
matter? No!”
This kind of deft
political quasi-answer is the sort of move Parton’s been pulling her entire career.
She expresses empathy rather than solidarity — she understands why people have
to make themselves known, even if she’s not showing up at a protest herself —
and she affirms that she loves everybody. And since she loves everybody, of
course their lives matter.
When Parton happens to
offend, as she did with the Dixie Stampede, it’s an accident. And when she
rebranded the Stampede, she presented it both as a decision in keeping with
good Southern manners (she doesn’t want to offend) and a practical business
decision that no one should take personally. Her actual thoughts on the
antebellum nostalgia in which the original attraction trafficked she kept to
herself.
“I’ve got as many
Republican friends as I’ve got Democrat friends and I just don’t like voicing
my opinion on things,” she told the Guardian in 2019. “I’ve seen things before, like the Dixie Chicks. You can ruin a career for speaking
out.”
Parton meets any
attempt to force her hand at a political statement with a quick and charming
two-step. At the 2017 Emmy Awards, she reunited with her 9 to 5 co-stars
Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin to present the award for Best Supporting Actor, only
to find Fonda and Tomlin united in speaking out against Donald Trump.
“Back in 1980, when we
made that movie, we refused to be controlled by a sexist, egotistical, lying,
hypocritical bigot,” Fonda said, quoting one of the repeated lines of 9
to 5.
“And it’s true in 2017
we still refuse to be controlled by a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical
bigot,” Tomlin said, to vociferous applause.
Parton, between Tomlin
and Fonda, went wide-eyed and took a step back from the microphone, although she
continued smiling gamely. Fonda threw an arm around Parton’s shoulders as she
went on with award show patter about best supporting actors, and then Parton
stepped forward with her go-to deflection move: a boob joke.
“Well, I know about
support,” she cracked, gesturing to her chest. “Hadn’t been for good support,
Shock and Awe here would be more like Flopsy and Droopsy!” Then she informed
the crowd that she was sure Tomlin had been referring to the villainous 9
to 5 boss Mr. Hart with that little quip. “How about a shoutout for
[Hart actor] Dabney Coleman out there?” And finally, just for good measure, she
threw in a sex joke, too. “I’m just hoping that I’m going to get one of
those Grace and Frankie vibrators in my swag bag tonight.”
“I just did not want
everybody to think that whatever they think is what I think,” Parton told the Guardian of the incident in 2019. “I don’t really
like getting up on TV and saying political things. I don’t even want to make a
deal out of it, but I want people to know I’m my own individual self. Even
though [Fonda, Tomlin, and I] may agree on a whole lot of things — and they may
have more agreement [between] themselves because they’ve been together for
longer — I still have my own thoughts and my own way of doing things. It’s not
a matter of being disrespectful, it’s just, OK, that’s what they said, I’m not
getting involved in it.”
Parton’s response to
Tomlin and Fonda’s anti-Trump statement functions as a sort of Rorschach test
for the viewer: You can read whatever you like into it.
“First off, Dolly
Parton didn’t do anything wrong. I guess some wanted her to spit in Lily’s
Tomlin’s face for disrespect, but guess what, that’s not Dolly’s style,” read a blog post on Saving Country Music arguing that
Trump-supporting Dolly fans had nothing to be angry about. “So you know, get
the hell over it. Dolly Parton is a gift bestowed to us otherwise downtrodden
and depressed apes moving about the crust of the godforsaken earth with slumped
shoulders, looking for meaning and respite from boredom, and I’ll be damned if
a bunch of tight asses will run her down for something she didn’t do.”
AMERICA IN THE 21ST
CENTURY IS NO TIME FOR A SECULAR POP SAINT
Meanwhile, in She
Come By It Natural, Smarsh reads Parton’s vibrator joke as subversively
feminist, and subliminally anti-Trump in its own way. “Hers was the least
directly political comment of the three,” Smarsh writes. “It was also the one
most assured to vex a man like Donald Trump — in whose eyes women exist for his
pleasure, diminish in value as they age, and need a man to achieve sexual
pleasure. What’s more anti-Trump than a rich seventy-one-year-old woman
fantasizing about a sex toy on national television after his name was invoked?”
Parton’s refusal to
take any explicit public political stance has served her well for most of her
career. Unlike younger stars, like Taylor Swift, she took little heat for refusing to
endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the 2016 election. “I just did not
want everybody to think that whatever they think is what I think,” Parton told the Guardian of the incident in 2019. “I don’t
really like getting up on TV and saying political things. I don’t even want to
make a deal out of it, but I want people to know I’m my own individual self.
“Both-sides-ism rarely feels as benevolent as it does when coming from
Parton,” mused the New York Times in 2019.
But as Parton’s
21st-century career revival continues, viewers are willing to see more sinister
undertones in her “both-sides-ism.” After all, what do we do when “both sides”
includes neo-Nazis and armed insurrectionists waving Confederate flags at the
Capitol?
In a close reading of Parton’s career on Longreads in 2018,
Jessica Wilkerson grapples with her own lifelong Dolly fandom, and specifically
with the way the idea of whiteness underlies Dolly’s image. “She’s embraced by
feminists and queer folks at the same time she is declared a queen by
Confederate apologists,” Wilkerson writes. “Dolly-as-mountain-girl anchors her to
an ancestral white home in the imaginations of white people, while her
class-conscious and gender-transgressive performance of whiteness becomes a
signifier for white progressives who embrace gender fluidity and working-class
iconolatry.”
RELATED
The Emmys’ cheeky 9 to 5 reunion was also the show’s most strident
anti-Trump moment
In Wilkerson’s
reading, Dolly is able to flirt with both sides of the political aisle — but at
a cost. “Dolly Parton has built her empire on and with the debris of old,
racist amusements and wrapped it in working-class signifiers and feminist
politics,” Wilkerson concludes, nodding to Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede. “I
ignored that fact for a long time because it didn’t fit the script of the
feminist, working-class heroine I had conjured. But I also ignored how others’
attachment to Dolly is exactly because of her embrace of Dixie and her complex
celebration of whiteness. And I have ignored how whiteness clings.”
Elsewhere in the
article, Wilkerson investigates labor conditions at Dollywood, which Parton
established in her hometown to bring jobs back to the area. Labor conditions
there, Wilkerson finds, are not Edenic: It’s hard work, low pay (although above
minimum wage), and patchy benefits.
“Dolly Parton promised
jobs to her community; she did not promise well-paying jobs,” Wilkerson writes.
“And while Dollywood does not pay the worst wages in Sevier County or in the
theme park industry, the wages are significantly lower than those they replaced
as the economy shifted from manufacturing to tourism.”
The idea that Parton’s
theme park is not a labor paradise is probably not enough to get Dolly Parton
canceled. Neither is the idea that she refuses to talk politics in public,
or that she allows racists to like her, or that she rewrote her labor rights
anthem to help sell Squarespace. But it is the sort of thing that makes the
reflexively trendy worship of Dolly — like a recent petition to replace all Confederate monuments in Tennessee with
statues of Dolly, “the ‘Jesus of Appalachia’” — start to feel a little lazy,
even cartoonish.
Dolly Parton is a
brilliant artist, and she also seems to be a nice lady who is doubtless doing
her best for all her many fans. But asking her to solve America’s fractured
social landscape and calling her Jesus is putting a lot on her. It’s putting a
lot on anyone. And Parton knows it.
Parton’s
internet-savvy management is well aware of the potential damage it might do
even to a living legend of Dolly’s stature for her to court overexposure. Last
November, Novell told the New York Times that Parton’s team planned
to pull back from the public eye in 2021, “to avoid oversaturating the market.”
Not long after, the
news broke that Parton had helped fund Moderna’s Covid vaccine. Dolly Parton,
it seems, just can’t help but keep giving us all what we want.
In January, the
Tennessee state legislature considered a bill to put up a statue of Parton on
the Capitol grounds. “At this point in history, is there a better example, not
just in America but in the world, of a leader that is [a] kind, decent,
passionate human being?” posited Democratic Rep. John Mark Windle. ”[She’s] a
passionate person who loves everyone, and everyone loves her.”
Parton asked the
legislature to remove the bill from consideration. “Given all that is going on
in the world,” she said in a statement, “I don’t think putting me on a
pedestal is appropriate at this time.”
So perhaps it’s up to
the public, after all, to let Dolly take a break, and to let her leave us alone
long enough for us to stop worshipping her and start missing her.
But will we? Or will
we keep craving ever more Dolly Parton? Will we always keep asking her to come
back to heal our wounds?
UPDATE: Dolly Parton’s
Dollywood says it will pay all tuition costs for employees pursuing higher
education to wage complaints
above@
ATTACHMENT SIXTEEN – From the Washington
Examiner
Dolly
Parton explains why she refuses to get political
by Heather Hunter October 11, 2023 08:27 PM
As Dolly Parton prepares
to debut her new book, Behind The Seams, to be released on
Oct. 17, the country music star shared why she rarely divulges her
political views in public.
"Because you’re
going to lose half your audience,” she said about not getting political.
ISRAEL WAR:
BIDEN'S $6 BILLION IRAN PRISONER SWAP DEAL UNDER HARSH SPOTLIGHT
“Even within my own
family, especially the last few years since Trump and Biden, all that, it’s
like we can’t even go to a family dinner anymore. Especially if people are drinking,
they get in a damn fight at the table. Don’t get so trapped where if you’re a
Republican, you got to be this way, [and] if you’re Democrat, you got to be
that way. You’re not allowed to think nothing else. Well, how crippling is
that?" the 10-time Grammy winner said in a Billboard profile
published on Wednesday.
Parton added,
"I’ve got as many Democrats as I do Republicans as fans, and I’m not going
to insult any of them because I care about all of them. I ain’t that good a
Christian to think that I am so good that I can judge people. That’s God’s job,
not mine."
"So as far as
politics, I hate politics. Hate politics,” she said.
The country star has previously turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom, not once
but twice, to avoid the appearance of political allegiances.
In 2020, the singer
weighed in on race relations in a rare political comment.
“I understand people
having to make themselves known and felt and seen,” she said. “And of course black lives matter. Do we think our
little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”
Parton explained her
comment as the view of a Christian who believes that "God is the judge,
not us. I just try to be myself. I try to let everybody else be themselves.”
When Slate magazine
criticized Parton for her Dixie Stampede attraction at her Dollywood amusement
park in 2017, the businesswoman then dropped "Dixie" from the
attraction because of its Civil War-era origins.
"There's such a
thing as innocent ignorance, and so many of us are guilty of that," she
said, explaining her decision. "When they said 'Dixie' was an offensive
word, I thought, 'Well, I don't want to offend anybody. This is a business.
We'll just call it The Stampede.
As soon as you realize
that [something] is a problem, you should fix it... That's where my heart is. I
would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose."
ATTACHMENT SEVENTEEN – From reddit
r/CrazyIdeas•10 mo.
ago
Join
Nominate
Dolly Parton for Speaker of the House
Even if she didn't accept, the near-unanimity of the vote
would offer momentary respite from the deadlock. If she did accept, we'd be in
good hands.
ATTACHMENT EIGHTEEN – From the Angry Bear
(Relevant and even prescient commentary on news,
politics and the economy)
What
Can be Done With This House of Representatives ?
Robert Waldmann | October 21, 2023 9:50 am
Obviously the only thing any reasonable person would
do is point and laugh at the Republicans. I am not that reasonable person, so I
will try to think of a solution.
Obviously one very boring possibility is that the
Republicans will finally get their act together and elect a speaker. This is
the most likely outcome, but very far from optimal.
The other possibility is that a speaker will be
elected by a bipartisan majority like the majority which prevented default and
delayed the government shutdown. I think this would be very good and want to
figure out how it might possibly happen.
One possibility is that number 1 vote getter Hakeem
Jeffries picks up 5 more votes and is elected speaker. This requires finding 5
Republican Representatives who are totally sick of it and want to leave (they
will never win a Republican primary and Democratic voters will probably prefer
a real Democrat) and who are also responsible, public spirited, and moderate. I
do not believe that there are 5 such Republicans. I don’t think it will happen
(for one thing the penalty might not just be the end of a career but also the
end of a life or two).
A more likely possibility is for a Republican representative
to be elected speaker with the support of some Democrats. I guess this will
mean all (or almost all) Democrats and a few Republicans. I am pretty sure that
the speaker will not be elected to the next Congress and nor will the few
Republicans. But I think this could be very attractive to someone who is sick
of the mess in the House and wants to quit. That person will quit as a hero
statesman (or woman) who saved the House. That means post career (in distant
2025) invitations to appear on TV talk shows and an income as a lobbyist more
than the usual 10 times a Representatives salary. The other at least 4 have to
be compensated too, without even getting the gavel.
I think this is a very attractive option for the
Democrats even if they get nothing explicit in exchange for their votes. The
fact that they gave the speaker the gavel means they can take it awayGaeta rules still in effect?@ (I think they can count
on at least 5 nutso Republicans who will never ever forgive the bipartisan
speaker — in any case the bipartisan speaker probably wouldn’t want to pull two
partisan shifts (that looks like ambition crazed politician not noble statesman
and this person will almost certainly be looking for a new line of work on
January 2025).
There are advantages for the few other Republicans who
sacrifice their careers by voting with Democrats. They get to be considered
bipartisan statespersons too. Also they get to blackmail the new speaker who
needs their support. In Italy politicians all try to be “l’ago del bilancio”
(the needle of the balance — that is the thing in the middle which decides who
wins). Gaining that position which winning the praise of all the very serious
talking heads should be highly attractive.
OK so I assume that doesn’t work and there is no Republican
representative who wants a gavel given by Democrats. The speaker does not have
to be a member of Congress. My next choice would be an eminent Republican
supreme court justice (two birds one stone – not gonna happen). Then some
Republican judge bored with working on an appeals court. None are likely to be
available.
Now I get to my actual proposal: Speaker Dolly Parton.
Everyone likes Dolly Parton. She actually is a
stateswoman willing to do a thankless job. She would need to brush up on the
rules of the House, but I think she’s a quick study.
I nominate Dolly
Parton for Speaker of the House of Representatives.
I’m not even 100% sure I am joking.
Update: assuming Ms Parton knows what’s best for her
and refuses, I have other desperate thoughts.
Susan Collins: Represents a state with a Democratic
Governor. Two birds. One stone. Definitely not available but a man can dream.
From the same state, how about Olympia Snowe: already
ejected from the party for an objectively pro-Democrat interest in actual
policy. Is used to enormous power based on Barack Obama’s devotion to
bipartisanship. Currently not busy as far as I know.
Mitt Romney: already a dead Republican walking. Looks
the part. Able to work with Democrats as he demonstrated when he enacted Obamacare
in Massachusetts long before most people had heard of Obama. Really really
hates Donald Trump. Reminds other Trump hating Republicans of the time before
Trump. Can afford the pay cut (actually I think Speakers make as much money as
Senators). As senator always votes with the other Republicans so it doesn’t
matter that he will be replaced by an ultra conservative a few years earlier
than is inevitable.
George Santos: would be worth it just for the laughs.
Sadly voting for him would discredit the Democratic party, but still might be
worth it just for the laughs.
My daughter suggests there might be 5 Republicans so
eager to really really stick it to the freedom caucus that they would vote to
make Michelle Obama speaker. I’d do it, but I’ve already decided to retire, so
I don’t care about future employability.
Update II: This is serious. I have secretly been
hoping for speaker Tom Cole.
I admit the reasons are two. FIrst he is Native American ( Chickasaw ).
Second he thought it was unfair that the Trump tax cuts gave even more money to
the rich (OK he voted for them but at least he said it was unfair).
He is currently chairman of the ruled committee. He is
always described as respected by both Republicans and Democrats. Given his
current standing in the Republican Party he is certainly not willing to get
elected speaker with the actual votes of actual Democrats. However I think there
are dozens of Democrats who would be willing to vote for him (as the best of
bad options) if it were necessary.
I think there are 217 Republicans who are willing to
vote for him given the understanding that he will be elected speaker with or
without there votes, with the votes of Democrats if necessary, and they
wouldn’t like a speaker to be elected with the votes of Democrats.
I think Democrats can even pass on the roll call to
make it clear that they will vote for Speaker Cole if that is necessary and do
you really want to be the Republican responsible for a speaker being elected
with the votes of Democrats “honorable” member Gaetz ? Aren’t you in enough
trouble already ?
ATTACHMENT NINETEEN – From
Change.org
Dolly
Parton For Speaker Of The House
Started
October 19, 2023
Why this petition
matters
Started by Kevin Tripp (Follow this
link to join – DJI)
The U.S. House of Representatives lacks a Speaker and
is dangerously adrift and only one American can unite Congress: Speaker of the
House Dolly Parton.
We all know Dolly. We all love Dolly. She can unite a
majority of Republicans and Democrats and lead the House as Speaker until
Congress can get its act together.
Dolly Parton has always avoided publicly commenting on
politics - which makes her uniquely qualified to be Speaker. Dolly is a
wonderful American who just wants things to work. She is above politics but
dedicated to all Americans. With help from deputies, should could easily
preside over Congress. Remember, a Speaker is not required to be a
Representative.
Dolly would probably not join a party. She'd just be Speaker.
An awesome Speaker. She could start the Dolly Party or the Hillbilly Party. Who
cares. We need Speaker Dolly.
Updates
- 5 supporters
2 days ago
- Kevin Tripp
started this petition
2 days ago
Reasons for signing
She is an outstanding
American and our best option.
We need
Speaker of the House Dolly Parton