It turns out his integrity is not absolutely unquestioned

Sep 28th, 2018 3:24 pm | By

Over the course of the morning I read, via a slew of name lawyers on Twitter, that both the American Bar Association and Yale Law school had withdrawn their endorsements of Kavanaugh pending an investigation. Greg Sargent at the Post wrote about it early in the day:

During his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, Brett Kavanaugh defended his qualifications for the Supreme Court by repeatedly citing his support from the American Bar Association. Crucially, Kavanaugh noted that the ABA had vetted him for the position. Kavanaugh said this not once but twice.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Kavanaugh’s chief defender, a man who melted down in a fit of histrionic rage at the sight of Kavanaugh getting confronted with the thoroughly credible testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, also cited the ABA’s support for Kavanaugh. Graham specifically cited the ABA, which he called the “gold standard,” in making the case that Kavanaugh “lived a good life” and that “his integrity is absolutely unquestioned.”

Now the ABA has issued a new letter calling for a renewed FBI background check into the charges against Kavanaugh, insisting that the Judiciary Committee must not hold any vote on his nomination until this happens:

The American Bar Association urges the United States Senate Judiciary Committee (and, as appropriate, the full Senate) to conduct a confirmation vote on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination only after an appropriate background check into the allegations made by Professor Ford and others is completed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

So bang went Kavanaugh’s claim that the ABA had vetted him for the position. (Does that count as yet another of his many lies?)

What’s more, the ABA is also asserting that voting to move him forward now — absent a reopened FBI background check — would represent a complete abdication of advice and consent duty on the part of individual senators, one that would flout the rule of law and due process.

That is, a complete abdication of duty by senators like Jeff Flake of Arizona.

So any Republican senators who are lawyers might be deeply uncomfortable with that.

Sargent says the decision to order the FBI investigation means they will interview Mark Judge.

Kavanaugh absolutely would not say he was willing to have an FBI investigation yesterday, no matter how hard the Democrats pressed him. So with any luck this is curtains for that hateful whiny entitled blowhard.



Not so fast

Sep 28th, 2018 3:12 pm | By

So. It flipped at the last minute. You probably already know by now, and if you don’t you probably don’t care (this is very US-centric, but then again when the US sneezes the world catches antibiotic-resistant TB, plus there is the whole hostile indifference to women issue), but here it is anyway. Jeff Flake voted with the Republicans to move Kavanaugh from the committee to the full Senate, but he also made that conditional on an FBI investigation first. Which they should have done all along. Flake on his own would have left things as they are because Pence would break the tie, but it turned out Flake wasn’t on his own.

But Flake — as well as Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar — suggested in the moments before the 11-10 vote that there were other Republicans who felt the same as Flake. As in, they would not support Kavanaugh’s confirmation unless and until the FBI investigation happens. Those senators are, presumably, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
None of what Flake did was binding — until the White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell weighed in. McConnell formally requested the White House to instruct the FBI to do supplemental background check, which “would be limited to current credible allegations against the nominee and must be completed no later than one week from today.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee announcement means that McConnell, as expected, has bowed to the fact that he does not currently have the votes. Presumably, Flake would not have a) made the one-week FBI investigation request and then b) voted for Kavanaugh to move favorably out of committee unless c) he knew that he had Murkowski and/or Collins (or some other Republican) was with him. (Murkowski confirmed to reporters after the session that she supports Flake’s proposal.)

President Donald Trump bowed to the inevitable on Friday afternoon, ordering an FBI investigation.

That’s an improvement on the grim march to the gallows of this morning.



Form an orderly queue

Sep 28th, 2018 2:56 pm | By

Oh cool, people in the UK get to pretend it’s World War 2 again, with rationing and shortages and all. Wot larks.

The government has appointed a minister to oversee the protection of food supplies through the Brexit process amid rising concerns about the effect of a no-deal departure from the European Union.

I saw this being passed around yesterday:

Image result for brexit food

Top left, EU; lower right, Brexit.

Food industry insiders welcomed his appointment after warnings that delays of only half an hour at UK ports and the Irish border would risk one in 10 British firms going bankrupt.

One food industry business leader said: “The issue at the ports is a big threat. The UK always has been a net importer of food. If the ports don’t work then exporters will be struggling and importers will have a challenge too.”

Don’t worry; it’s only food.

Fears have risen amid the increasing likelihood of Britain crashing out of the EU without a deal in little more than six months time, after Theresa May failed to win support for her Brexit plan from European leaders and said both sides had reached an impasse.

Ministers have attempted to downplay concerns by suggesting they could relax efforts to collect border taxesto maintain the free movement of imports and exports in the event of no deal. However, food retailers have said such plans could still lead to a logjam on the UK side of the border as trucks get stuck trying to head back into the EU to pick up their next load.

Well, stock up on cans of tasteless white beans in tomato sauce.



Follow the money

Sep 28th, 2018 11:53 am | By

I keep wondering why Flake doesn’t just break ranks. I hadn’t thought of this.

Oh. Of course. The whole reason retired pols are in demand as lobbyists is because they have connections. If they burn the connections, no millions from lobbying.

In short it’s utterly corrupt and money-seeking.



Pulpy

Sep 28th, 2018 11:34 am | By

This helps a little.



If an assailant attaches little significance to an assault

Sep 28th, 2018 10:59 am | By

Memory is complicated.

From the dizzying stream of incoming perceptions, the brain stores, or “encodes,” the sights, sounds, sensations and emotions that it deems important or novel. The quality of preservation may depend not only on the intensity of emotion in the moment an event occurs but on the mechanics of how that event is recorded and retrieved — in some cases, decades later.

“Recollection is always a reconstruction, to some extent — it’s not a videotape that preserves every detail,” said Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of “Remembering Trauma.” “The details are often filled in later, or dismissed, and guessing may become part of the memory.”

Also, I have read elsewhere, for instance in the work of Elizabeth Loftus, that recalling a memory changes it. There’s no such thing as an intact unchanged memory.

For a trauma victim, this encoding combines mortal fear and heart-racing panic with crystalline fragments of detail: the make of the gun, the color of the attacker’s eyes. The emotion is so strong that the fragments can become untethered from time and place. They may persist in memory even as other relevant details—the exact date, the conversation just before the attack, who else was in the room — fall out of reach.

“In situations of high arousal, the brain is flooded with hormones that strengthen those things you’re paying attention to,” said Daniela Schiller, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “But other details are less accessible.”

Conversely, experts suggest, there are scenarios in which someone could have committed an assault and yet also have almost no memory of it. If an assailant attaches little significance to an assault—for instance, if he doesn’t consider it an assault — his brain may only weakly encode details of the encounter.

Ahhh yes, of course. That makes sense. It seems all too clear that Kavanaugh never did consider what he was doing an assault. It was just “horseplay”; it was just horndog teenage boys doing what horndog teenage boys do; it was just Rock Hudson trying to nudge Doris Day into the sack; it was just Ensign Pruitt in Mister Roberts hoping to get the nurses drunk so that he could rape them; it was just good clean fun. If he had thought of it as rape maybe he would have remembered it, but naturally it wasn’t in his interest to think of it as rape, was it. Rape is bad, rape is a violent crime, rape is a felony, rape is low class, rape is for losers, rape is not something a nice white boy from a nice elite Catholic prep school would do. No no, it was just Brett and Mark having boyish romps with some girl whose name they never caught. They went downstairs laughing and forgot all about it.



The patriarchy testing the limits

Sep 28th, 2018 10:29 am | By

A grotesque display of patriarchal resentment, Doreen St. Félix calls it.

At the time of this writing, composed in the eighth hour of the grotesque historic activity happening in the Capitol Hill chamber, it should be as plain as day that what we witnessed was the patriarchy testing how far its politics of resentment can go. And there is no limit.

For real. A woman testifies about what it was like to be pinned down and nearly suffocated by the nominee to the Supreme Court – and who flies into a rage? The male nominee who did the pinning down and near-suffocation, and a male Senator on his team. She was anxious and stressed but also serious and disciplined; the two hes were in spitting rages. Dominance sure does give people a lot of anger-privileges.

“Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?” Ford had told the Washington Post when she first went public with her allegations. With the word “annihilation” she conjured the spectre of Anita Hill, who, in her testimony against Clarence Thomas, in 1991, was basically berated over an exhausting two-day period, and diagnosed, by the senators interrogating her, with “erotomania” and a case of man-eating professionalism.

I remember it all too vividly. I particularly remember the “testimony” of John Doggett, and having to go out for a long walk to burn off the simmering rage he inspired.

Ford, in any case, was phenomenal, a “witness and expert” in one, and it seemed, for a moment following her testimony, that the nation might be unable to deny her credibility.

Then Kavanaugh came in, like an eclipse. He made a show of being unprepared. Echoing Clarence Thomas, he claimed that he did not watch his accuser’s hearing. (Earlier, it was reported that he did.) “I wrote this last night,” he said, of his opening statement. “No one has seen this draft.” Alternating between weeping and yelling, he exemplified the conservative’s embrace of bluster and petulance as rhetorical tools. Going on about his harmless love of beer, spinning unbelievably chaste interpretations of what was, by all other accounts, his youthful habit of blatant debauchery, he was as Trumpian as Trump himself, louder than the loudest on Fox News. He evaded questions; he said that the allegations brought against him were “revenge” on behalf of the Clintons; he said, menacingly, that “what goes around comes around.” When Senator Amy Klobuchar calmly asked if he had ever gotten blackout drunk, he retorted, “Have you?” (He later apologized to her.)

He behaved like an absolute pig – he behaved like a threat. He acted like any other guy who tears off the mask of mature civil normality to reveal a red-eyed furious asshole underneath. He completely, in my view (and that of many), nuked his own suitability for the Supreme Court…but it’s looking as if he will be put there anyway. A violent furious ragey rapey entitled privileged shithead who despises what he calls “the left” and sees plots to avenge “the Clintons” where there are none – on the Supreme Court.

There was, in this performance, not even a hint of the sagacity one expects from a potential Supreme Court Justice. More than presenting a convincing rebuttal to Ford’s extremely credible account, Kavanaugh—and Hatch, and Lindsey Graham—seemed to be exterminating, live, for an American audience, the faint notion that a massively successful white man could have his birthright questioned or his character held to the most basic type of scrutiny…Republican senators apologized to the judge, incessantly, for what he had suffered. There was talk of his reputation being torpedoed and his life being destroyed. This is the nature of the conspiracy against white male power—the forces threatening it will always somehow be thwarted at the last minute.

There was also much talk of his family. But who torpedoed his reputation? Who destroyed his life? Who brought all this on his family? Maybe it was not the Democrats or the plotters-for-theClintons or Christine Blasey Ford, maybe it was Kavanaugh himself. It’s pretty rich watching entitled drunk rapey guy blaming other people for his drunken rapey entitled ways.

Bad times; bad bad times.



Rage boys in charge

Sep 28th, 2018 9:24 am | By

Related image



Not all that supreme

Sep 27th, 2018 5:34 pm | By

Trump is stoked. He thinks that display of entitled white boy rage by Kavanaugh was just the ticket.

President Donald Trump and his aides were ebullient Thursday as Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh defiantly rejected charges of sexual misconduct — a mood that reflected some relief after Trump officials conceded that his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, offered a compelling performance in the first half of the day.

Trump and senior officials were impressed by Kavanaugh’s combative defense before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which the Trump nominee, alternating between fury and tears, called several misconduct charges against him a “calculated and orchestrated political hit” and “national disgrace” that had devastated his life and family.

Minutes after the committee adjourned Thursday evening, Trump tweeted that his nominee “showed America exactly why I nominated him.”

“His testimony was powerful, honest, and riveting,” Trump wrote. “Democrats’ search and destroy strategy is disgraceful and this process has been a total sham and effort to delay, obstruct, and resist. The Senate must vote!”

Yeah. Don’t let those bitches get away with saying you attacked them, even though you did – fight back, get scary-mad, rage about your family as if what’s happening to them were not your fault, and generally act like a selfish privilege violent angry asshole. That’s the kinda guy we want on the Supreme Court!



A taste of the aggression that emerged when Kavanaugh got drunk

Sep 27th, 2018 12:51 pm | By

But he seems like just the type to be aggressive toward women.



Two friends having a really good time

Sep 27th, 2018 10:44 am | By

Apparently much of the country is in tears watching the testimony, and I can see why. Gut-wrenching.



The Lynchburg contingent

Sep 27th, 2018 10:20 am | By

Apparently conservative women support rape. Who knew?

Students from Liberty University, whose president Jerry Falwell Jr. is a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, will rally in Washington on Thursday in support of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Liberty University and all the Jerries Falwell consider themselves intensely Christian, Christian all the way down, as Christian as it gets. It’s interesting to learn that it’s top most Christian to support – staunchly – a guy who brags about grabbing women by the pussy, who fucks around and brags about that, who fucks around while his wife is recovering from childbirth – a guy who lies and cheats and steals, a guy who exploits the poor, a guy who has nothing but contempt for justice, a guy who preaches for selfishness and against generosity, for nationalism and against globalism – a guy who spits on most of the ideas generally considered Christian.

The university and the organization Concerned Women for America (CWA) are sponsoring bus trips from the Liberty campus in Lynchburg, Va., to Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning.

So Concerned Women for America are fine with rape and opposed to women who are not fine with rape. I have to wonder why that is, exactly.

Students at the evangelical Christian university who are making the trek to Washington say while the allegations against Kavanaugh are serious, they’re calling for him to be granted a presumption of innocence.

Why? Why should he be given a presumption of innocence? Especially in order to strongarm him onto the Supreme Court? He’s not the only person who could possibly fill that seat, so why? This isn’t jail we’re talking about, it’s just not giving him this one important job.

“Our goal is to just get support for him. Moral support,” said Victoria Belk, 21, president of Liberty’s chapter of Young Women for America, the campus version of CWA. “This could be our brother, our dad, our boyfriend and we strongly believe in our justice system and you’re innocent until proven guilty.”

This could be their sister, their mother, their best friend, themselves. What about that? What about her? You’re not innocent until proven guilty at a job interview.

Some students making the trip find suspicion in the late arrival of the allegations, which surfaced shortly before senators were expected to vote on Kavanaugh.

“I don’t want to disregard the women who have accused Brett Kavanaugh of these actions, and I don’t want to say that what they’re saying is completely invalid,” said Christian Lasval, a 19-year-old sophomore. “But the timing of it all and the way that it’s been handled is a little suspect to me and it would not be beneath the Democrats, considering how low they’ve stooped in the past, that they would do this just to stifle his confirmation.”

Oh yes those evil Democrats, so unlike the Republicans who kept a Supreme Court vacancy open for nearly a year because they refused the let Obama (read:the nigger) appoint another justice.



Cowards, miscreants, and misogynists, each and every one

Sep 27th, 2018 9:23 am | By



All these years with Brett Kavanaugh’s laughter

Sep 27th, 2018 9:07 am | By

I’m not watching the hearing live; I’ll probably watch parts of it later. Twitter is supplying commentary.



Shut it down, said Trump

Sep 27th, 2018 8:57 am | By

Michael Lewis gives a glimpse of how Trump managed the transition from random real estate profiteer to idiot president.

[Chris] Christie volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential transition team. “It’s the next best thing to being president,” he told friends. “You get to plan the presidency.” He went to see Trump about it. Trump said he didn’t want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan anything before he actually became president? It’s legally required, said Christie. Trump asked where the money was going to come from to pay for the transition team. Christie explained that Trump could either pay for it himself or take it out of campaign funds. Trump didn’t want to pay for it himself. He didn’t want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed, grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for his transition team. “But not too much!” he said.

Not too much! It’s only running the country! Watch the pennies!

So Christie got down to work.

The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?

Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.

Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.

And bring him two scoops of ice cream.

Christie pointed out that the media would disapprove, and Trump saw the point, so he let Christie get on with it.

With that, Christie went back to preparing for a Trump administration. He tried to stay out of the news, but that proved difficult. From time to time, Trump would see something in the paper about Christie’s fundraising and become upset all over again. The money that people donated to his campaign Trump considered, effectively, his own. He thought the planning and forethought pointless. At one point he turned to Christie and said: “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”

Actually, Trump is so stupid that he thinks he’s smart.



The performance

Sep 26th, 2018 5:06 pm | By

In case you want to watch the waking nightmare that is that Trump press conference.

CBS picks out some highlights.

 

Mr. Trump reiterated his support for Kavanaugh throughout the press conference, lauding him as one of the great intellects of the country. But he did say he could change his mind after testimony from the women accusing the nominee. “That is possible,” he said.

Asked by CBS News’ Steven Portnoy what message the president is sending to young men with his stance on Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump decried a situation he sees as “guilty until proven innocent.”

“In this case, you’re guilty until proven innocent,” he said.

This is the guy who paid for a full-page ad in the New York Times demanding the death penalty for the Central Park 5, and who insisted they were guilty after DNA evidence showed they were not.

Mr. Trump was asked about an incident the day before when world leaders laughed, after he declared his administration had accomplished more than perhaps any other.

The president declared coverage of that event fake news.

“They weren’t laughing at me, they were laughing with me,” Mr. Trump said.

The president said he told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to get into the “time game” over denuclearization in North Korea.

The president said that, whether denuclearization takes two years, three years, or five months, it doesn’t matter.

Mr. Trump, pressed insistently by CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang, admitted that the accusations of sexual misconduct against him from multiple women “absolutely” affect how he views the allegations against Kavanaugh.

The president went off about how “women who got paid a lot of money to make up stories about me. We caught them and the mainstream media refused to put it on television.” Their accusations, false ones, the president said, certainly affect his view of the Kavanaugh allegations.

“It does impact my opinion,” the president said. ” Because I’ve had a lot of false charges made against me. I’m a very famous person unfortunately. I’ve been a famous person for a long time. I’ve had a lot of false charges made against me. Really false charges.”

“I know friends who’ve had false charges,” he continued. “People want fame, they want money. So when I see it I view it differently than somebody sitting home watching television when they say ‘Oh, Judge Kavanaugh, this or that.’ It’s happened to me many times. I’ve had many false charges.”

“I had a women sitting in an airplane, and I attacked her while people were coming on to the plane when I had a bestselling book coming out. It was a totally phony story. When you say, ‘does it affect my thinking in respect to Judge Kavanaugh,’ absolutely, because I’ve had it many times. If the news would have reported these four people. When I heard they caught these four people, I said this is a big story. And it was, for Fox.”

Fox News’ John Roberts asked the president if there was an opportunity missed in not having the FBI further review the allegations against Kavanaugh.

“Well the FBI told us they’ve investigated Judge Kavanaugh six times, five times,” but “here there was nothing to investigate,” Mr. Trump said.

The president then went on to say Democrats are carrying out a “con” job in pushing the allegations and allowing the process to slow down. Mr. Trump said that behind closed doors, Democrats “laugh like hell.”

It’s worth watching at least a couple of minutes of it, to get a sense of how off the charts nuts he seems. As in, advanced dementia.



Guest post: It’s not about the lying

Sep 26th, 2018 3:42 pm | By

Originally a comment by iknklast on It’s the lying.

Of course, that idea of lying is what makes this interesting. Democrats have gone down for lying, and Clinton’s impeachment centered a lot around his lying. But the interesting thing is that the Dems were, for the most part, dealing with consensual sexual acts between consenting adults (even accepting the possibility that Lewinsky couldn’t be consensual because of disparate power, but with that caveat, most women can’t be truly said to be consenting, since men in general have disparate power over women in general).

The Repubs, on the other hand, who seem to get away with it, are not consensual. Anita Hill did not consent to being sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas. The girls that Roy Moore messed with were not adults, and therefore unable to give consent to an adult male. Kavanaugh also was not dealing in consensual sex, either in his teenage exploits or the more recently alleged college exploits.

So it really is about the lying to most people, and that is the problem. I don’t hold with lying, but I also believe that a person’s consensual adult sexual life is their own business, and should not be part and parcel of the election/impeachment process.

But rape? No, Kavanaugh is not about the lying, it is about the rape. Rape – a crime. But not just a crime, a crime against another human being, a human being with less power, a human being who is denied their own bodily autonomy by the choice of another human being to rape. A crime which deprives human beings of their peace of mind, their happiness, their confidence. And even if rape itself did not occur (no penetration), it is still a crime – sexual assault. And it is targeting a specific group, a group historically oppressed and disenfranchised, a group that in general has less power and less ability to affect change. And those excusing it should ask themselves – would they excuse such a thing if it happened to them? Would they feel it was just juvenile antics? Would they be willing to sit in their living room for the rest of their life watching the news talk about the person who had perpetrated this act on them, and realizing that this man was now in one of the most desired jobs in the entire country, making decisions that affect the life of the victim (and everyone else) and nothing being done about it – except, of course, mocking and shaming the ones who bravely came forward? We all know the answer to that – if they were the victim, they would scream from the rafters until the perp was shamed and censured. They would not stand for it. But if it’s a woman?

The problem often is couched as lying, and in the case of Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, I think that’s reasonable. In the case of consensual sex, I think it’s reasonable to say it’s about the lying. But in a case of sexual assault, it is not reasonable. That tells women that they don’t matter, it’s okay what a guy does to them as long as he doesn’t lie about it. (And a lot of people have suggested that it would have been okay if he would just admit it and say he’s learned from experience, he’s sorry, and he won’t do it again – note: THIS DOES NOT MAKE IT OKAY).



Trump distracted from Kavanaugh battle by pesky meddling UN

Sep 26th, 2018 11:53 am | By

Trump thinks Kavanaugh is doing a bad job of defending himself so he’s taking over.

President Donald Trump has grown increasingly dissatisfied with the way Brett Kavanaugh has defended himself in wake of sexual assault allegations that have threatened to derail his Supreme Court nomination, multiple sources tell CNN.

It has led the President to believe that he must personally take charge of defending his embattled nominee ahead of Thursday’s critical appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Trump made the decision to hold a news conference on the eve of the hearing, making it the fourth he has held as president.

Trump is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, but is being kept up to date on the latest developments with Kavanaugh. An official traveling with him said he is still standing squarely behind Kavanaugh.

No wonder he looked so tired and bored and drunk when he gave his speech yesterday; he was impatient to get back to the real fun.

Trump, who watched the [Fox] interview, thought Kavanaugh appeared “wooden,” according to one person familiar with the President’s thinking, and told several other allies he should have been more aggressive in his defense.

“You’re also not seeing him on his footing,” Trump said after the interview aired. “This isn’t his footing. He’s never been here before. He’s never had any charges like this, I mean charges come up from 36 years ago that are totally unsubstantiated.”

While Trump is totally used to it because he’s been assaulting women his whole adult life.

Though Kavanaugh has been flabbergasted as the women have come forward, he has remained measured publicly, while Trump has become increasingly agitated and animated while discussing the allegations.

The drama has overshadowed what was supposed to be a week of diplomacy at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Ahead of the President’s arrival in New York last weekend, aides hoped an intensive schedule might deter him from further inflaming the precarious confirmation proceedings back home, which most Republicans concurred was best played out without Trump’s intervention.

But Trump has been fixated on the Supreme Court confirmation battle as he shuttles between meetings with world leaders and wields the gavel at Wednesday’s meeting of the United Nations Security Council. He made clear what was on his mind when the President turned to his Colombian counterpart, President Iván Duque, Tuesday and said: “You must say, ‘How is this possible?’ “

So typical of Trump. “You must be interested in what I’m interested in.”

Trump addressed the matter again Wednesday, minutes before he chaired the Security Council meeting, remarking he would have pushed Kavanaugh’s nomination through the Senate two weeks ago if he were responsible for the proceedings.

“They could have pushed it through two weeks ago and we wouldn’t be talking about this right now, which is what I would have preferred,” Trump said, describing Kavanaugh as a “gem” who had been unfairly maligned.

Oh yes we would, you pig. You can’t shut us up, not unless you stage a real coup.

Trump, who has been accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women and denied the allegations, has often said punching back is the most effective defense.

The President’s idea of a robust defense is causing heartburn during a tense week on Capitol Hill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has conveyed to Trump that his comments are only complicating the confirmation process further and Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who will be a critical vote for Kavanaugh, said she was appalled by the President’s remarks, calling them “completely inappropriate and wrong.”

Hey, rapey guys have to defend each other.



It’s the lying

Sep 26th, 2018 10:42 am | By

Historian Claire Potter says it’s the lying at least as much as the sexual assaults.

The phrase “he said, she said” is often used to characterize the opaqueness of a sex crime: Without a direct witness, someone must be lying. But who? Is it equally likely that the accuser and the accused will lie? Conservatives don’t think so. Kavanaugh, as Thomas did, has categorically denied all charges, and his supporters have characterized Blasey as the agent of a smear campaign orchestrated to keep Kavanaugh off the court.

But Blasey’s story resonates with feminists and, in a change from 1991, with male Democratic senators — some of whom are former prosecutors shaped by the legal world that feminists made. Blasey’s supporters are strongly implying that Kavanaugh is lying and that Republicans are determined to keep Blasey — and possibly a second and a third accuser — from disproving these lies.

That so many people are focused on the question of lying instead of the underlying acts is the result of a fairly recent historical development. Lying has, of course, been a staple of American public life for centuries. But the exposure of lies, especially when those lies intersected with politicians’ dissolute private lives, became a staple of the new political journalism that emerged from the ashes of Watergate in 1974.

That’s what ended Gary Hart’s political career, she explains.

The destruction of Hart’s candidacy and the appetite of Americans for televised scandal set the stage for the Hill-Thomas hearings in a way that a decade of conversation about sexual harassment, a word that had entered the law in 1979, had not. And yet the question of whether Thomas had, as Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson put it, a “Rabelasian” sensibility that Hill was turning to political purposes was inseparable from whether he was lying about what had occurred.

Patterson speculated that Thomas probably had said and done the things that Hill had described — and that he had lied about it. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Patterson defended those alleged lies. “Judge Thomas was justified in denying making the remarks,” he wrote, “even if he had in fact made them, not only because the deliberate displacement of his remarks made them something else but on the utilitarian moral grounds that any admission would have immediately incurred a self-destructive and grossly unfair punishment.”

Grossly unfair? To be denied a seat on the Supreme Court he’d never deserved in the first place? Unfair to say a liar, which in this case meant also a perjurer, should not be on the Supreme Court? Let’s not forget why Bush nominated Thomas at all: it was because he felt it wouldn’t look too swell to put a white guy in Thurgood Marshall’s seat but he couldn’t find an outstanding Republican black guy so he had to go with a mediocre one. (There was of course no question of putting a woman in that seat, black or white – we already had the woman!)

In hindsight, it seems fairly clear that Thomas’s supporters — two of whom, Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), are still on the Judiciary Committee — knew that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill and other women. Journalist David Brock, who famously characterized Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” during the hearings, later admitted that he had not only lied about Hill as part of a coordinated effort to protect Thomas but that he had helped Thomas to silence another potential accuser.

And Joe Biden also helped to silence the other potential accuser.

As the accusations against Kavanaugh pile up, it seems likely that some, if not all, Senate Republicans and President Trump, suspect — or even know — that Kavanaugh has done what his accusers say he has done. And it seems clear that many Republicans are embracing Patterson’s approach, arguing that even if Kavanaugh is lying about his dissolute youth, who can blame him given how disproportionate the punishment would be over a crime from decades ago?

Except not getting a very important public official job that’s all about law and truth and integrity is not a punishment. No doubt Kavanaugh would be very disappointed (as so many teenage girls were no doubt disappointed to find themselves being raped by classmates), but people are disappointed not to get jobs all the time. I see no reason at all to treat Kavanaugh’s potential disappointment as more important than anyone else’s, let alone as a “punishment” let alone a disproportionate one.

Republicans are still determined to push the Kavanaugh nomination through, despite the fact that a growing number of journalists and attorneys are dedicating themselves to finding evidence to support Blasey’s claims. The question is whether any potential victory will be worth the cost. Kavanaugh may end up on the Court, but he’ll be tainted and delegitimized in the eyes of millions of Americans. Is that how Brett Kavanaugh wants to go down in history?

Yes, it apparently is.



A total low-life

Sep 26th, 2018 10:08 am | By

Now Avenatti has dropped the bomb he’s been promising.

A third accuser of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday publicly identified herself and alleged that Kavanaugh and others while in high school spiked the drinks of girls at parties with intoxicants to make it easier for them to be gang raped.

The woman, Julie Swetnick, said Kavanaugh was in line with other boys, including his close friend Mark Judge, waiting to rape those girls at many parties, and that she once became a victim herself. The allegations were detailed in an affidavit released by her lawyer, Michael Avenatti.

Trump has already issued a statement.

Such a dignified, thoughtful, fair-minded president.

The White House had no immediate comment on Swetnick’s allegations, which were signed under penalty of perjury.

Trump’s tweet came after the piece was written and posted – I know that because it came in as a breaking news pop-up headline while I was reading the piece. That’s the White House comment – Avenatti is a total low-life.

Image result for gangster bugs bunny

A 1980 graduate of Gaithersburg High School in Gaithersburg, Maryland, [Swetnick] said she has has held multiple work clearances for work done at the Treasury Department, U.S. Mint, IRS, State Department and Justice Department, among others.

Swetnick, in the affidavit posted on Twitter by Avenatti, claims that she saw Kavanaugh, as a high school student in Maryland in the early 1980s, “drink excessively at many” house parties in suburban Maryland. At the time, Kavanaugh and Judge were students at the the private Catholic school Georgetown Prep.

She said he and Judge engaged in “abusive and physically agressive behavior toward girls,” which “included the fondling and groping of girls without their consent” and “not taking ‘No’ for an answer.”

During the years of 1981 and 1982 she said she learned of efforts by Kavanaugh, his friend Judge and others “to spike the drinks of girls at house parties I attended with grain alcohol and/or drugs so as to cause girls to lose inhibitions and their ability to say ‘No.’ “

But they went to a Catholic school, as Kavanaugh said with such emphasis on Fox Monday night. Surely Catholic boys treat girls with respect.