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Judi Lynn

(160,516 posts) Tue Jul 17, 2018, 09:56 PM Jul 2018

Roby wins Alabama primary runoff

Source: Politico

Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Republican defeats former Rep. Bobby Bright.

By POLITICO STAFF 07/17/2018 09:34 PM EDT

Rep. Martha Roby won her Republican primary runoff Tuesday in Alabama, defeating a former Democratic congressman who gained traction attacking Roby as insufficiently supportive of President Donald Trump.

Roby had 67 percent of the vote to former Rep. Bobby Bright’s 33 percent when The Associated Press called the race, with 43 percent of precincts reporting.

Roby had won reelection easily since she defeated Bright, a former Democrat, in 2010. But Roby lost Republican support to a write-in candidate in the 2016 general election after she said that she would not vote for Trump. Primary challengers, including Bright, picked up the charge in 2018 and held Roby to 39 percent in June’s primary, short of the majority needed to win, prompting the one-on-one runoff.

But Roby worked to make amends with Trump, who tweeted an endorsement of her last month. And Roby and her allies highlighted Bright’s Democratic past, including his vote for Rep. Nancy Pelosi for House speaker in 2009. See live results here.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/17/alabama-primary-results-roby-bright-729052

Do you recognize the Texas Congressman standing right behind Roby? Remember someone who wore yellow ducky pajamas to a strange party?

Yes! It's Blake Farenthold!

Photo: Susan Walsh, STF
House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio poses for a photo with Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, right, accompanied by family, to re-enact the House oath-of-office, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2015, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

For Farenthold, a long journey from duck pajamas to a lawsuit
Photo put lawmaker on long road to lawsuit - and integrity questions
By Kevin Diaz January 16, 2015 Updated: December 4, 2017 10:00am

. . .

Five years later, that photo still comes back to haunt him.

"A week doesn't go by it doesn't show up on Twitter," said Farenthold, now in his third term in Congress.

Lately, though, the image has reverberated among Farenthold's political opponents as the 53-year-old Republican faces a lawsuit accusing him of drinking to excess, flirting with a 27-year-old female press aide and dismissing her after she complained about a "hostile" work environment in his Washington office.

. . .

Farenthold, the scion of old Texas oil money, is the unlikely Tea Party step-grandson of the pioneering Democratic legend Sissy Farenthold, who once ran for Texas governor. As a self-described introvert, he cultivates an unassuming, regular-guy image unaffected by the trappings of great wealth and power.

More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/For-Farenthold-a-long-journey-from-duck-pajamas-6021085.php

On edit:

Went to find a photo of Blake Farenthold's step-grandmother, Sissy Farenthold, Democrat, who ran for the Texas Governor's office. Simply mind-boggling:

Wow! Read some facts about his step-grandmother:

https://www.womenonthemovetx.com/frances-farenthold/

http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Frances+Sissy+Farenthold+Mary+Ann+Smothers+XNL9rvSotasl.jpg

An article which adds depth to the story of this family:

APRIL 1992
The Blood of the Farentholds
The mysterious disappearance of Sissy Farenthold’s youngest son is only the latest chapter in a tragic family history.

In a happier time, the Farenthold family portrait. From left: Vincent, who bled to death in 1960; Randy, who was found murdered in 1972; George Senior, the Belgian-born patriarch; George Junior; Dudley; Sissy; Emilie; and Jimmy, who disappeared three years ago this month.
Photograph by Wide World

He was a small child, not yet four, and so the floorboards did not betray his movements as he slipped out from under his blankets, walked past the bed where his twin brother slept, and headed down the dark hallway. His parents were out for the evening, while the baby-sitter, his half brother, was somewhere downstairs, preoccupied with a girlfriend. The boy’s other siblings were asleep. No one heard him enter the bathroom and climb atop the stool in front of the sink. No one heard the stool give way and the child fall, his head colliding against the tile floor. The boy suffered from a form of hemophilia; by the time they had taken him to the hospital, he had already bled all there was to bleed. A few days later, they buried him in a family plot just west of downtown Corpus Christi, under a simple marker that read: “Vincent Bluntzer Tarlton Farenthold. February 8, 1956–January 26, 1960.”

The funeral was an agonizing experience for the boy’s mother, 33-year-old Frances “Sissy” Tarlton Farenthold, and all the more so because the tragedy brought her face to face with an image from her childhood that reared up to haunt her now and again. The recurring image was that of another dead three-year-old boy: her brother Benjamin Dudley “Sonny” Tarlton III, who had died from complications following surgery to remove a quarter he had swallowed. When her great-aunt Mary hoisted the then two-year-old Sissy up to view her brother stretched out in the casket, the little girl beheld the old women sobbing all around her, then looked down at the boy’s motionless body. All she could think was: Why won’t Sonny get up?

Sissy Farenthold would never forget that feeling of bewilderment. She would remember her mother’s reclusiveness, remember her snapping up all of the pictures of Sonny and putting them away where they would never be seen again. She would remember her father, a towering and mirthful man, and how he commemorated his eldest child’s passing by spending each May in a state of weeping depression. Recalling the tragedy of her childhood years, Sissy Farenthold resolved two things following the death of her son. First, she would not become a captive of grief. She would move forward from Vincent’s death, throwing herself at one challenge and then the next—a crusade of diversion that became another crusade entirely, one from which Sissy Farenthold emerged as the state’s best-known liberal politician and one of the nation’s most prominent feminists.

By comparison, her second decision seemed uneventful though just as heartfelt. Recalling how the image of her brother in the casket had stayed with her, Sissy Farenthold decided that her youngest child, Jimmy, Vincent’s identical twin, should not attend the funeral with the rest of the family.

More:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-blood-of-the-farentholds/

http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/International+Documentary+Association+IDA+XNL9rvSotasm.jpg