Roy Moore is a *fucking child molesting loser*

[Howl]

This is depressing, all of it.  If I were a betting person, I'd bet there is a very good possibility that Roy Moore will be the next senator from Alabama.

However, the "moderate" GOP does not want Roy Moore anywhere near DC.  They are only too happy to pull support and are secretly hoping that Roy doesn't get elected. 

[fraurosena]

It's a conspiracy, ya'll!

Alabama voter malfunctions when asked to prove conspiracy theory on Moore accusers

Quote

An Alabama voter suggested Roy Moore’s accusers were part of an orchestrated campaign against the Republican candidate — but she suffered a brief malfunction when asked to identify the choreographers.

The voter, Martha Shiver, attended a “Women for Moore” rally Friday in the state Capitol in Montgomery, and she spoke briefly to MSNBC reporter Vaughn Hillyard.

“Well, I want to let him know that we’re 100 percent behind him, we believe in him and we just don’t really believe in all the slander that’s going on, and we want him to know that we’re 100 percent behind him,” Shiver said.

Hillyard asked if she believed the women who have accused him of pursuing sexual relationships with them when he was a prosecuting attorney in his 30s and they were teenagers, and the reporter asked Shiver whether such relationships were considered more normal back then.

“I think at a young age he may have pushed the issue and she got probably rejected, and now she’s saying that something that I don’t think happened,” Shiver said.

Hillyard again asked the woman if she believed Moore’s accusers.

“I think that they’re out for money, I think they’ve been pushed by the other people to say things that is not true,” Shiver said.

The reporter asked her to identify those people pushing Moore’s accusers to go forward, and the question seemed to catch her completely off-guard.

“Um,” Shiver said, before taking a long pause. “I wouldn’t really like to say that on TV. But I think, really, Luther Strange is probably behind a lot of this. I really don’t trust him, and I just don’t trust him.”

Hillyard asked what the event, where Moore’s wife spoke, was intended to accomplish.

“I believe in Roy Moore, all the way, 100 percent,” Shiver said. “We’re saying a prayer today, and we’re letting him know that this group of people is all for him, and that we’re 100 percent behind him.”

[Cartmann99]

If Franklin has proof of such heinous criminal acts, why isn't he talking to law enforcement? 

[GreyhoundFan]

An interesting perspective piece: "I know Roy Moore. He’s always been a con artist."

Spoiler

I first encountered Roy Moore in 2002 in a Montgomery, Ala., courtroom, where I was an expert witness on the separation of church and state in what came to be known as the Alabama Ten Commandments case. Moore, then the state’s chief justice, was the defendant. He had installed a granite block emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery, declared that the event marked “the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land” and then refused to allow any other religious representations in that public space.

“Roy’s Rock” represented a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and Moore was being sued for so blatantly flouting the Constitution. He was silent that day in the courtroom, but he had already made a great deal of noise about the United States being a Christian nation. One of his arguments was that the founders were aware of no religion other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise.

That statement, of course, was demonstrably, ridiculously false. But that’s Roy Moore. The Republican Senate nominee has fashioned an entire career out of subterfuge and self-misrepresentation — as a constitutional authority, as a Baptist and as a spokesman for evangelical values. The recent allegations of sexual misconduct, together with his many specious statements over the years — that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom only for Christians, for example, or that many communities in the United States stagger under the burden of Islamic sharia law — underscore both his hypocrisy and his tenuous grasp of reality.

In 2004, after Moore was unseated for refusing to obey a court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument and was touring as a kind of full-time martyr for the religious right, I visited the judge in Montgomery, together with a group of students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In the course of the conversation, Moore launched into his riff about how the founders intended Christianity as the only constitutionally protected religion because they knew nothing else. (The founders were most certainly aware of Jews and Muslims, who appear in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and in the Treaty of Tripoli as “Mussulmen,” the French term. That same treaty, negotiated by the John Adams administration and ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”)

I decided to play along. By Moore’s logic, I suggested, another clause of the First Amendment, freedom of the press, applied only to newspapers and not to other media because the founders had no knowledge of radio, television or the Internet.

Moore, rarely at a loss for words, was stumped for a moment, but he quickly regained his composure and resumed his bluster.

Aside from boasts about his constitutional expertise, Moore also asserts that he is a Baptist. (He is a member of First Baptist Church in Gallant, Ala.) Once again, his behavior belies that claim. The Baptist tradition in America is marked by two characteristics. The first is that only adults and older children, not babies, may be baptized. The second is a belief in liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state , which grew in part out of Baptists’ persecution as a minority in early America.

It was Roger Williams, a dissident Puritan who fled to what’s now Rhode Island and became the founder of the Baptist tradition in America, who advocated for dividing the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” Jefferson, writing to the Baptists of Danbury, Conn., in 1802, employed the same metaphor to summarize his understanding of the First Amendment.

For Williams and his contemporaries, the “wilderness” was a place of darkness where evil lurked, so when Williams talked about a wall of separation to protect the garden from the wilderness, his concern was that the integrity of the faith would be compromised by too close an association with the state.

For more than three centuries, at least until the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Baptists patrolled the wall of separation between church and state. Speaking at a rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on May 16, 1920, Baptist theologian George Washington Truett proudly declared that the separation of church and state was “preeminently a Baptist achievement.” He added that it was “the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced, and that it is not the prerogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship.” Echoing Williams’s sentiments from several centuries earlier, Truett concluded that Christianity “needs no prop of any kind from any worldly source” and that any such support is a “millstone hanged about its neck.”

That washing-machine-size rock Moore unveiled in Alabama was a 5,280-pound millstone. No one even dimly aware of Baptist heritage would tolerate such chicanery because the confluence of church and state, as Williams warned, diminishes the faith and opens it to fetishization and trivialization.

Finally, Moore claims to represent “family values” and, more broadly, evangelical Christian values. Aside from the disquieting specter of a 30-something Moore trolling shopping malls for teenage dates, Moore does not represent the evangelical movement he claims to herald. Historically, evangelicalism once stood for people on the margins, those Jesus called “the least of these.” Evangelicals in the 19th century advocated public education, so that children from less-affluent families could toe the first rungs of the ladder toward socioeconomic stability. They worked for prison reform and the abolition of slavery. They advocated equal rights, including voting rights, for women and the rights of workers to organize. The agenda of 19th- and early-20th-century evangelicals is a far cry from that of Moore and the religious right. I leave it to others to determine which version of “evangelical values” better comports with the words of Jesus, who instructed his followers to visit the prisoners, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and care for the needy.

The image that Moore has tried to project over the course of his career — as a constitutional authority, a Baptist and a representative of evangelical values — is false, even fraudulent. The voters of Alabama have the opportunity to unmask him as the imposter he is.

 

[Howl]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

An interesting perspective piece: "I know Roy Moore. He’s always been a con artist."

  Reveal hidden contents

I first encountered Roy Moore in 2002 in a Montgomery, Ala., courtroom, where I was an expert witness on the separation of church and state in what came to be known as the Alabama Ten Commandments case. Moore, then the state’s chief justice, was the defendant. He had installed a granite block emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery, declared that the event marked “the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land” and then refused to allow any other religious representations in that public space.

“Roy’s Rock” represented a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and Moore was being sued for so blatantly flouting the Constitution. He was silent that day in the courtroom, but he had already made a great deal of noise about the United States being a Christian nation. One of his arguments was that the founders were aware of no religion other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise.

That statement, of course, was demonstrably, ridiculously false. But that’s Roy Moore. The Republican Senate nominee has fashioned an entire career out of subterfuge and self-misrepresentation — as a constitutional authority, as a Baptist and as a spokesman for evangelical values. The recent allegations of sexual misconduct, together with his many specious statements over the years — that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom only for Christians, for example, or that many communities in the United States stagger under the burden of Islamic sharia law — underscore both his hypocrisy and his tenuous grasp of reality.

In 2004, after Moore was unseated for refusing to obey a court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument and was touring as a kind of full-time martyr for the religious right, I visited the judge in Montgomery, together with a group of students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In the course of the conversation, Moore launched into his riff about how the founders intended Christianity as the only constitutionally protected religion because they knew nothing else. (The founders were most certainly aware of Jews and Muslims, who appear in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and in the Treaty of Tripoli as “Mussulmen,” the French term. That same treaty, negotiated by the John Adams administration and ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”)

I decided to play along. By Moore’s logic, I suggested, another clause of the First Amendment, freedom of the press, applied only to newspapers and not to other media because the founders had no knowledge of radio, television or the Internet.

Moore, rarely at a loss for words, was stumped for a moment, but he quickly regained his composure and resumed his bluster.

Aside from boasts about his constitutional expertise, Moore also asserts that he is a Baptist. (He is a member of First Baptist Church in Gallant, Ala.) Once again, his behavior belies that claim. The Baptist tradition in America is marked by two characteristics. The first is that only adults and older children, not babies, may be baptized. The second is a belief in liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state , which grew in part out of Baptists’ persecution as a minority in early America.

It was Roger Williams, a dissident Puritan who fled to what’s now Rhode Island and became the founder of the Baptist tradition in America, who advocated for dividing the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” Jefferson, writing to the Baptists of Danbury, Conn., in 1802, employed the same metaphor to summarize his understanding of the First Amendment.

For Williams and his contemporaries, the “wilderness” was a place of darkness where evil lurked, so when Williams talked about a wall of separation to protect the garden from the wilderness, his concern was that the integrity of the faith would be compromised by too close an association with the state.

For more than three centuries, at least until the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Baptists patrolled the wall of separation between church and state. Speaking at a rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on May 16, 1920, Baptist theologian George Washington Truett proudly declared that the separation of church and state was “preeminently a Baptist achievement.” He added that it was “the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced, and that it is not the prerogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship.” Echoing Williams’s sentiments from several centuries earlier, Truett concluded that Christianity “needs no prop of any kind from any worldly source” and that any such support is a “millstone hanged about its neck.”

That washing-machine-size rock Moore unveiled in Alabama was a 5,280-pound millstone. No one even dimly aware of Baptist heritage would tolerate such chicanery because the confluence of church and state, as Williams warned, diminishes the faith and opens it to fetishization and trivialization.

Finally, Moore claims to represent “family values” and, more broadly, evangelical Christian values. Aside from the disquieting specter of a 30-something Moore trolling shopping malls for teenage dates, Moore does not represent the evangelical movement he claims to herald. Historically, evangelicalism once stood for people on the margins, those Jesus called “the least of these.” Evangelicals in the 19th century advocated public education, so that children from less-affluent families could toe the first rungs of the ladder toward socioeconomic stability. They worked for prison reform and the abolition of slavery. They advocated equal rights, including voting rights, for women and the rights of workers to organize. The agenda of 19th- and early-20th-century evangelicals is a far cry from that of Moore and the religious right. I leave it to others to determine which version of “evangelical values” better comports with the words of Jesus, who instructed his followers to visit the prisoners, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and care for the needy.

The image that Moore has tried to project over the course of his career — as a constitutional authority, a Baptist and a representative of evangelical values — is false, even fraudulent. The voters of Alabama have the opportunity to unmask him as the imposter he is.

 

That's an awesome article.  I learned some good things about evangelical and Baptist practice and belief in earlier times, which are certainly considered progressive in this century. 

[neurogirl]

On 11/17/2017 at 10:45 AM, Cartmann99 said:

It's going to be a very ugly scene when Kayla Moore's denial stops working for her.

 

Kayla Moore's gimundo cross earrings will both protect her from having rude awakenings, and tell those good old Alabaman pharisees to vote Moore. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GrumpyGran]

12 hours ago, neurogirl said:

Kayla Moore's gimundo cross earrings will both protect her from having rude awakenings, and tell those good old Alabaman pharisees to vote Moore. 

They need to protect her from that hair. It looks like a tumbleweed landed on her head. The picture does not do it justice.

Dollars to donuts, he still makes her dress like a cheerleader when he wants to exercise his sexual rights. We know Roy loves Toy Story, but I wonder if Kayla has a "Miss Kitty" outfit a la "Gunsmoke". I mean, why does he wear a cowboy hat, it's Alabama!

[fraurosena]

He’s right, you know.

Because, what the everloving fuck?!?!!!!

 

[Cartmann99]

Quote

A pastor who supports Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) blasted the allegations of sexual harassment against Moore, saying they’re part of a “war on men.”

"More women are sexual predators than men," Pastor Franklin Raddish of Independent Baptist Ministries, a nationwide church, told Alabama news outlet AL.com. "Women are chasing young boys up and down the road, but we don't hear about that because it's not PC."

Yup, that's why our society constantly tells women not to walk alone at night, not to be "too nice" to strangers, to be careful where we parked the car, to get a dog if we live alone, to not leave our drink alone at a club, to ignore the catcalls, to try to avoid crowded elevators, to try to find another woman to sit near on public transportation, to let guys down easy if we are not interested, to take self-defense classes, to be careful what we wear, to laugh off inappropriate comments, to try and redirect our supervisor's attention away from our bodies, to walk with our keys splayed out between our fingers, etc....

I'm not saying that female sexual predators don't exist, but I am saying you are full of crap if you think that female sexual predators are the vast majority of offenders, but somehow avoid being caught and punished in great numbers.

Oh, and Pastor?  Bless your heart, it's such a burden to be a white man in the South, isn't it? It really burns your ass when women and "those people" start getting ideas above their station, doesn't it? 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The publisher of AL.com blasts back at legal threats from Roy Moore"

Spoiler

After The Post published an investigative article documenting Roy Moore’s pursuit of a 14-year-old girl in 1979, the Republican Senate candidate from Alabama pledged to sue the newspaper. “The Washington Post published another attack on my character and reputation because they are desperate to stop my political campaign. These attacks said I was with a minor child and are false and untrue — and for which they will be sued,” Moore said a week ago during a campaign stop in Huntsville, Ala.

Turns out Moore was also concerned about a media outlet closer to home. Moore’s camp has twice threatened the Alabama Media Group, home to AL.com, according to a letter from a lawyer for the company. “You have accused AL.com of making ‘false reports and/or careless reporting’ about multiple subjects related to your clients,” reads the letter from John Thompson of Lightfoot Franklin White LLC. “Your letter demands that AL.com retract and recant its prior stories and that it ‘cease and desist’ from any further reporting about your clients,” reads the letter.

“AL.com hereby rejects your demand,” it continues.

Michelle Holmes, vice president of content for Alabama Media Group (AMG), tells the Erik Wemple Blog that the company lacks specificity on just what stories have offended Roy Moore, Kayla Moore and their Foundation for Moral Law. “As the letter outlines, these demands appear to be a show more than they are a serious attempt to question what we believe to be fully legitimate, serious reporting,” says Holmes. The letter states, “You have not explained how anything that AL.com has reported is untrue, inaccurate or erroneous, nor do you provide any support for your position.”

A Nov. 14 letter from Trenton Garmon of Garmon & Liddon LLC broadly cites “false reports” and mentions reporting about a “fifth woman” who alleged misconduct by Moore; Moore’s signing of a yearbook even though “experts” have confirmed the signature is “not consistent with his handwriting”; and the contention that Moore was “banned” from the Gadsden Mall.

As a target of authoritarian-style intimidation, AMG makes some sense for Moore & Co. In addition to AL.com, the company runs the state’s three largest newspapers — the Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times and Press-Register of Mobile — and is part of Advance Local, a network that stitches together sites across the country. “I think they recognize that the viewpoint of Alabamians is what matters most, and if they can silence us, they would love to do it. They’re not going to be able to do it,” says Holmes.

Not content to merely play defense against the threats from Moore, the AMG letter notes that litigation from the Senate candidate would “also reveal other important information about your clients.” In that spirit, it gives notice to Moore & Co. that they are to preserve all “materials, documents, writings, recordings, statements, notes, letters, journals, diaries, calendars, emails, videos, computers, cell phones, electronic data, and other information” related to these matters. Which is to say: Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Moore.

,,, < copy of the letter, which is great >

I love when bullies are taken aback by a strong response.

[Cartmann99]

Do we dare hope that Roy Moore is dumb enough to follow through and sue AMG? 

 

[JMarie]

On 11/17/2017 at 1:45 PM, Cartmann99 said:

It's going to be a very ugly scene when Kayla Moore's denial stops working for her.

 

Remember that scene at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman, where Richard Gere scoops up Debra Winger and carries her off into the sunset?  Roy could never do that to Kayla.

[Flossie]

7 hours ago, JMarie said:

Remember that scene at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman, where Richard Gere scoops up Debra Winger and carries her off into the sunset?  Roy could never do that to Kayla.

Of course not.  He's not 30 something anymore, and she's not a scared 14 year old.

[GrumpyGran]

So, wait. Do all white evangelical men imagine themselves as an amalgam of Michael Douglas movie roles? Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction. Oh and Wall Street. WTF, they really need to stop watching movies!

[Cartmann99]

It's Monday, and Kellyanne Conway is still awful.

 

 

[GrumpyGran]

Hey, maybe they can bring Dennis Hastert back, is he out of prison?

[Cartmann99]

Leigh Corfman's interview from the Today show:

 

[apple1]

28 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

It's Monday, and Kellyanne Conway is still awful.

 

 

So angering. And this MAY possibly be the one woman in the Trump orbit who annoys me worse than Sarah Sanders. And wow, is that saying A LOT.

[JMarie]

2 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Leigh Corfman's interview from the Today show:

 

Good for her!! 

[Cartmann99]

Completely off-topic, but after watching Savannah Guthrie's interview, and seeing Sarah Hucksterbee Slanders wearing very dark eye makeup, is this a trend right now? I must be ancient, as this looks like an evening makeup look to me, not something for most workplaces. 

[GreyhoundFan]

@Cartmann99 -- maybe she's prepping to audition for Cruella DeVil in another remake of 101 Dalmatians.

[TheMustardCardigan]

One of my law school classmates just posted this mind blowing article about how Roy Moore is totally OK because Jesus! 

 

Just one gross passage from the article:

Quote

When it comes to sin, and suspicion of sin, the Master was quite clear. “Every charge,” he said, every accusation of wrongdoing, must be “established by the evidence of two or three witnesses” (Matthew 18:16; emphasis mine throughout). In other words, if there is just one witness, that accusation cannot be considered a valid accusation, cannot be considered a fact, and cannot be considered actual evidence in terms of establishing the truth about what did or did not happen. If there is just one witness, you have zero evidence in the court of public opinion, which is the only place this case can be tried. (In Judge Moore’s case, the voters of Alabama will serve as the jury on December 12.) 

 

The guy I went to school with is a super conservative recent convert to some apparently twisted branch of Christianity. Really disturbing to me that someone studying the law is perfectly okay with throwing out common sense or the real rules of evidence in favor of the Fundie Rules of Evidence. Also ironic that these are the same people who support a candidate who says Muslims should be banned from public office because they're supposedly going to impose shariah law on us all, yet here they are trying to govern us with their own self-serving interpretations of their religion.

[GrumpyGran]

41 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Completely off-topic, but after watching Savannah Guthrie's interview, and seeing Sarah Hucksterbee Slanders wearing very dark eye makeup, is this a trend right now? I must be ancient, as this looks like an evening makeup look to me, not something for most workplaces. 

I think someone in her office who doesn't exactly like her pulled her aside one day and told her that her make-up wasn't appropriate for the job she was doing, then got out the eye-liner and eye shadow and false eyelashes. Stupid Slanders didn't bother to ask what job this other woman thought she was doing. 

[Cartmann99]

Boston Globe article about Roy Moore's appalling supporters:

Quote

Repeatedly, the pastors attempted to discredit Moore’s accusers in personal terms, with some dismissing their emotional stories as “crocodile tears” and “fake news.”

“I don’t know how much these women are getting paid, but I can only believe they’re getting a healthy sum,” said pastor Earl Wise, a Moore supporter from Millbrook, Ala.

Wise said he would support Moore even if the allegations were true and the candidate was proved to have sexually molested teenage girls and women.

“There ought to be a statute of limitations on this stuff,” Wise said. “How these gals came up with this, I don’t know. They must have had some sweet dreams somewhere down the line.

“Plus,” he added, “there are some 14-year-olds, who, the way they look, could pass for 20.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2017/11/19/why-evangelicals-are-again-backing-republican-despite-allegations-sexual-misconduct/nls3lkhOHopU5fUe6bM2hJ/amp.html

This is another time when the thoughts I'm having towards this disgusting man must be left unsaid so that I don't violate the TOU.