Alabama’s US Senate race all about Trump love, swamp hate

PIKE ROAD, Ala. (AP) — On a humid afternoon, U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, on his campaign bus named the Drain the Swamp Express, pulled into a central Alabama farmer’s market and said he is the true conservative to help enact the agenda of President Donald Trump.

Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore in his own stump stop said the country voted for change with the election of Trump, but there are people in Washington D.C. who don’t want it. “The swamp!” someone interjected from the crowd.

In the Alabama race for Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ former Senate seat, the Republican slugfest primary is about love of all things Trump — with contenders competing to woo Trump voters — and disdain of the so-called swamp of Washington D.C.

But Sen. Luther Strange, who was appointed to the position in February, last week was handed what could be his trump card in what’s become a contentious GOP civil war. Trump delivered an endorsement of Strange one week before voters head to the polls, on Tuesday.

“Senator Luther Strange has done a great job representing the people of the Great State of Alabama. He has my complete and total endorsement!” Trump tweeted Tuesday night.

The Strange campaign within hours had radio and digital ads touting the endorsement in the closing days of the campaign in a state that overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016.

“I think it’s going to make the difference. That’s what I told the President,” Strange said. Strange said the president offered his support in a Tuesday phone call and asked what he could do. “I said, well a tweet would be great,” Strange said.

Despite national plummets in his approval ratings, Trump remains popular among Republican voters in the Deep South state where Trump resoundingly defeated Hillary Clinton.

“The average working man out here in America, we do not give one damn bit about the Russia situation,” John Lake, who works at a Mobile-area shipyard, said during a Brooks campaign stop earlier this summer. “We’re thinking about how we are going to pay our bills, how are we going to retire.”

While Strange is boosted by Trump’s endorsement, he could also be dragged down by accusations of his ties to establishment Republicans.

Strange is backed by a super political action committee tied to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The PAC has pumped millions into an advertisement blitz on behalf of Strange as it seeks to beat back GOP insurgents. Ever since a series of messy primaries led to losing general election Senate races in 2010 and 2012, Republicans led by McConnell of Kentucky have worked aggressively to defeat challengers deemed as fringe.

But that backing has become a major rallying cry for Strange’s challengers. Brooks has labeled him as the candidates of the “swamp critters.”

“The principled conservatives, my constituents, they’re excited about telling Mitch McConnell that we don’t like him butting into the state of Alabama and we want different leadership and we want support for President Trump’s agenda,” Brooks said at one campaign stop.

“We’ve got people up there that don’t want change despite the fact in November 2016 the people of this country voted for change,” Moore said.

Moore was twice removed from duties as chief justice for defying courts on gay marriage and the public display of the Ten Commandments. He is particularly considered a tough competitor for Strange in the GOP primary because of his heavy support from evangelical voters.

The heated Republican primary will head into a September runoff unless a single candidate tops 50 percent of the vote in the first round of balloting on Tuesday.

Becky Gerritson, the head of the one the state’s most active tea party groups, said Republicans in her area don’t care for McConnell. Moore won the tea party organization’s straw poll, but Gerritson said she supports Brooks.

“They are sick and tired of what is happening in Washington,” Gerritson said. “We voted for Trump because we are ready for change.”

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London to lose Big Ben’s iconic bongs for years

LONDON — Big Ben will fall silent next week in London as a major restoration project gets underway.

The bongs of the iconic bell will be stopped on Aug. 21 to protect workers during a four-year, $38 million conservation project that includes repair of the Queen Elizabeth Tower, which houses Big Ben and its clock.

Steve Jaggs, keeper of the Great Clock, said Monday that the mechanism will be dismantled piece by piece and its four dials will be cleaned and repaired.

Big Ben has been stopped several times since it first sounded in 1859, but the current restoration project will mark the longest period of silence for the bell.

It will still sound on big occasions, such as Remembrance Sunday.

Jaggs said last year when the renovation plans were announced that it couldn’t wait much longer.

“The tower is not unstable,” he said. “But unless we do something now it’s going to get a lot worse.

“We need to do the work pretty soon to keep this for future generations to enjoy.”

Jaggs said the renovation would include work to repair corrosion to the cast-iron roof and stop water seepage that threatens to “blow chunks” of stonework from the iconic 160-year-old building.

The huge clock will be stopped for several months so that Parliament’s clockmakers can work on the 13-foot pendulum and remove the hands from each of the four faces.

The 13.5 ton Big Ben bell will cease to sound the hours for the next four years however, while it is cleaned and checked for cracks.

Officially named the Elizabeth Tower in honor of Queen Elizabeth II, the structure is one of London’s most famous landmarks. It became a symbol of defiance when it survived German bombing raids during World War II — though one of the four clock faces was blown out.

The tower is popularly known as Big Ben, though that is actually the name of the largest of its five bells. The four smaller bells chime the quarter hours, while Big Ben bongs out the hour.

The sound of the bongs became associated with Britain around the world during wartime BBC news broadcasts, and is still played live each day on BBC radio through a microphone in the belfry.

In October 2015, when worries over the condition of the clock tower first seeped into the mainstream press, British newspaper columnist Quentin Letts told CBS News that stopping Ben Ben would be like stopping the heartbeat of London.

“This is the marrow in our bones, this old clock,” said Letts. “The thought of it not being there, or one hand flying off, or heaven forbid, the thing going digital, is just too gruesome to consider.”

Jaggs said workers would make sure that Big Ben still chimes at midnight on New Year’s Eve throughout the renovations.

The repair work will use traditional methods and materials as much as possible, but a couple of modernizations are planned.

The 28 lightbulbs behind each clock face will be replaced with energy efficient LED bulbs that can change color, so the clock tower can be tinted to mark major celebrations or commemorations.

And there are plans to install an elevator in a ventilation shaft. Currently the only way to the belfry is up a 334-step circular staircase.

The tower repairs are only a small part of the work that needs to be done to shore up a Parliament complex beset by damp and decay.

A report released in 2015 said the 19th-century neo-Gothic structure needed major repairs that could cost up to 7 billion pounds ($11 billion) to remove the risk of a “catastrophic failure.” One option under discussion would see lawmakers move out for up to six years while the work is done.

Jaggs said that even if the rest of the building is empty and under scaffolding, the tower “will still be a beacon of democracy around the world.”

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