Kavanaugh/Blasey Ford Sexual Assault Allegations Hearing

[Mecca]

I was raped and molested by my brother for years. I finally spoke up after years of abuse. Instead of protecting me, my parents decided to take it to God and the congregation of my father’s church. I was asked to forgive his sin. My brother slung snot and cried just like Kavanaugh today and said, “God forgave me.”  

Today was a rough one, my friends. This is what I learned. Even after many years of seeking professional help to heal from years of abuse from my family, I still hurt. I still have pain from it all. I still have trust issues. I still hold a lot of anger and suffer from anxiety and depression. And even though many more women are speaking out about their assaults and abuse, we are still trying to be silenced. Seeing this today really opened up a wound I now know will never heal. 

I feel horribly for Professor Ford. I am mad, sad and anxious for her. No one should have to go through this. Assholes like Kavanaugh should suffer greatly for their actions, but I am beginning to think they never will. They get rewarded. 

[AmazonGrace]

Bush Jr is still bad  

 

[TeddyBonkers]

I talked to my mom yesterday, and it was a rough conversation. She said, "Why is she coming forward now? It seems like revenge to me."

Me: MOM, NO. She is coming forward because this guy is set to make decisions for the rest of his life that will effect EVER SINGLE AMERICAN. (Side note, she doesn't have cable, so she probably didn't see any of the hearing.) I'm sure that Trump can find another white judge that would vote to overturn Roe and Obamacare, because that's all he cares about.

And then we had to change the topic of conversation.

I leave you with this picture, my friends, which I would title "Women Are Too Emotional":

[Imaginary_Wonderland]

@TeddyBonkers Last night, my mum came out with pretty much the exact same shit. She just randomly announced it as I was turning off Netflix, I didn't say anything. I know I should have challenged her or argued it out with it, but found the rage bubbling inside me and my throat constricting, and I know I would be wasting my breath, She only listens to and respects what men have to say. I just don't understand her at all. It is little wonder I kept my own #metoo experience to myself all this time. I'm still sad and a bit angry I didn't have my mum to turn to when I needed help and support though. 

I had only being dipping in and out of this case, not following it intensely, but I was so enraged after the conversation that I couldn't sleep or stop thinking about it. So spent early hours online reading up on twitter. I woke today with  a bad headache and still in a bad mood. 

 

[TeddyBonkers]

@Imaginary_Wonderland, big hugs if you are okay with that! After a brief foray onto Facebook this morning, I had to nope right out of there.

Take care of you, however you feel is best. You matter. 

[AmazonGrace]

Lindsey Graham knows better than a silly woman who was there (hey Lindsey, you wouldn't happen to know who killed JonBenet Ramsey would you?) 

 

[SassyPants]

Lindsey, Trump and Kavanaugh sitting in a tree kissing [each others asses].

 

Bend over, America

[formergothardite]

Is this fixable if we manage to take back our country? Are we just stuck with him for life? 

[GreyhoundFan]

There was absolutely nothing funny about the hearing yesterday, but Alexandra Petri has a good and sarcastic take: "HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO BRETT KAVANAUGH?"

Spoiler

HOW DARE YOU?!
HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO BRETT KAVANAUGH?
HOW DARE YOU DENY HIM THIS SEAT?!

Listen, NO, YOU listen!
Do you know who Brett Kavanaugh is? Brett Kavanaugh went to Georgetown Prep!
BRETT KAVANAUGH IS AN OPTIMIST WHO LOOKS ON THE SUNSHINE SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN!
BRETT KAVANAUGH IS NOT YELLING!
YOU’RE YELLING!

If Brett does not secure a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, this country will be IN SHAMBLES! THIS IS HIS BIRTHRIGHT! Do you know how embarrassing it is for a Georgetown Prep graduate to NOT be on the Supreme Court? They are literally 12 PERCENT of the court! THIS IS PROBABLY THE WORST INDIGNITY YOU CAN INFLICT ON A HUMAN BEING!

ALL BRETT IS ASKING FOR IS DUE PROCESS! DUE PROCESS BEFORE HE IS DEPRIVED OF HIS GOD-GIVEN RIGHT TO A SEAT ON THE HIGHEST COURT IN THE LAND, WHERE HE WILL DETERMINE THE FATES OF MILLIONS!

Apply the standard you want to apply to your husband-brother-son. He should be allowed to be careless. He should be allowed to like beer.
BRETT LIKES BEER!
WHO DOESN’T LIKE BEER!
BRETT ISN’T YELLING!
YOU’RE YELLING!
THIS IS A CON JOB!
THIS IS A FARCE!
YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED!
THIS IS BRETT’S SEAT!

The Founders did not break from Britain so a landed white gentleman accused of sexual misconduct could NOT be given FREE REIN over the lives of millions!

If you give this woman credence, you will start a terrible trend. THINK OF ALL THE CARELESS PREP SCHOOL BOYS WHO WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO SIT ON THE HIGHEST COURT IN THE LAND! WOMEN WHO HAVE SUFFERED TRAUMA WILL BE ALLOWED TO GET ON PLANES WILLY-NILLY — EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE FRIGHTENED!

You are going to deny a qualified man. The treasurer of Keg Club — DO YOU HEAR HIM, HE WAS KEG CLUB TREASURER! AND A RENATE ALUMNIUS! HOW DARE YOU DENY A KEG CLUB TREASURER AND RENATE ALUMNIUS A SUPREME COURT SEAT?!

ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE HER, AMERICA? OVER HIM, AMERICA?

YOU HEARD THE WOMAN! SHE DOESN’T EVEN LIKE TO FLY! YET SHE FLEW HERE! SHE DOESN’T REMEMBER ALL THE DETAILS OF THE EVENING, WHEREAS HE KEPT A CALENDAR, LIKE HIS FATHER BEFORE HIM!

HE IS NOT EMOTIONAL!
YOU ARE EMOTIONAL!
NO, YOU LISTEN!

If this is how you are going to behave, if you are going to believe this woman, if you will let her stand there and destroy his life (well, not his life, technically, nor his freedom, just his chance of a seat on the highest court in the land), then what kind of country is this going to be?

They are going to drag him here in front of all these OTHER MEN and deny him a seat on the Supreme Court, and he will have to walk home confused and disoriented, and he will have to live with the feeling that he is NOT ON THE SUPREME COURT for as long as he lives. Whenever he gets on a plane and sits in his seat, he will think of the seat HE IS NOT IN.

This is OPPRESSION! TO BE DENIED POWER OVER OTHERS! IF THAT IS NOT WHAT IT IS, DO NOT TELL ME.

He should be given exactly as much benefit of the doubt as we would not give a black man shot in his own apartment by police. HE DESERVES IT! IT IS HIS BIRTHRIGHT. HE WENT TO GEORGETOWN PREP.

As President Trump said, “This is beyond Supreme Court. This is everything to do with our country. When you are guilty until proven innocent, it’s just not supposed to be that way. Always I’ve heard you’re innocent until proven guilty. I’ve heard this so long. It’s such a beautiful phrase. In this case, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I think that is a very dangerous standard for our country.”

IT IS TRUE! No man should be deprived of his life, liberty or the deciding seat on the highest court in the land without DUE PROCESS. THIS SHOULD BE HIS. The right to decide the fates of millions is one a man like him is born with, ONE OF THOSE INALIENABLE RIGHTS, AND IT SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN FROM HIM WITHOUT BEAUTIFUL DUE PROCESS!

NOW HIS WORLD IS FALLING APART! NOW HE IS BEING FORCED TO GO OVER HIS HIGH SCHOOL BEHAVIOR WITH A FINE-TOOTHED COMB! THIS IS NOT FAIR! THIS SCRUTINY! THIS DEMAND TO ACCOUNT! HE DESERVES THIS POWER! GIVE IT TO HIM! STOP ASKING HIM THESE QUESTIONS! STOP TRYING TO SLOW THIS TRAIN DOWN! THIS TRAIN HAD BETTER GET WHERE IT IS GOING, OR SOMETHING BAD WILL HAPPEN!

STOP SAYING THINGS! SHHH! BE QUIET! STOP RESISTING BRETT KAVANAUGH. STOP TRYING TO STOP HIM.
NO, LISTEN! LISTEN!

HE DESERVES THIS!

LISTEN, YOU DON’T DESERVE THIS. AMERICA DOESN’T DESERVE BRETT KAVANAUGH ON THE SUPREME COURT.

IF THIS IS HOW AMERICA IS GOING TO BEHAVE,
IT DOESN’T DESERVE BRETT KAVANAUGH AT ALL!

 

[SassyPants]

3 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

Is this fixable if we manage to take back our country? Are we just stuck with him for life? 

It's a lifetime position...or at the individual justice's discretion as to when they will retire/step down.

There HAS TO BE a better candidate-

[formergothardite]

3 minutes ago, SassyPants said:

It's a lifetime position...or at the individual justice's discretion as to when they will retire/step down.

There HAS TO BE a better candidate-

But can we change that? There has to be  a way to make it that judges aren't there for life. It is insane that a position like this is for life and the American people don't even get to vote the person in. No one needs to have that much power for that long. 

[SilverBeach]

4 minutes ago, SassyPants said:

It's a lifetime position...or at the individual justice's discretion as to when they will retire/step down.

There HAS TO BE a better candidate- 

Yeah, like Merrick Garland.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Lindsey Graham’s meltdown gives away the GOP game on Kavanaugh"

Spoiler

Christine Blasey Ford has finished testifying, and judging by Twitter and cable, the widespread consensus among neutral observers and even some Republicans has been that she was entirely credible. Ford was endearingly convincing in declaring that her only true motive in coming forward was to help the assembled senators — and the country — by informing them of what she personally experienced at the hands of Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Ford erred on the side of caution when navigating the perils of memory, and struck an oddly compelling balance by airing her own emotions while explaining them in the clinical language of a psychology professor.

As many have pointed out, Rachel Mitchell — the prosecutor who questioned Ford so GOP senators didn’t have to — seemed to burn up her time on meaningless trivialities, asking Ford questions about her fear of flying, making opaque points about the layout of the neighborhood and floating impenetrable arguments about who paid for Ford’s polygraph test.

Why did Mitchell do this? Did she just screw up?

I think the answer lies in the meltdown that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) just displayed to reporters moments ago. Referring to Democrats, Graham said:

I’m really upset that they knew about this in August and never told anybody. … All I can say is that we’re 40 days away from the election, and their goal — not Ms. Ford’s goal — is to lay this past the midterms so they can win the Senate and never allow Trump to fill this seat…I don’t know who paid for her polygraph but somebody did. … I feel ambushed.

As the majority, we’re going to hear from Judge Kavanaugh. … When it comes to where it happened, I still don’t know. I don’t know when it happened. She said she’s 100 percent certain it did happen. I bet you Judge Kavanaugh will say “I’m 100 percent sure I didn’t do it.” … She can’t tell us how she got home and how she got there. That’s the facts I’m left with. A nice lady who has come forward to tell a hard story … if this is enough, God help anybody else that gets nominated.

My guess is that the Republican game going into this was for Mitchell to make as few waves as possible, because they expect that Kavanaugh will be able to deny the allegations with sufficient conviction to allow the handful of wavering GOP senators to decide they have just enough cover to confirm him, on the idea that at its core, this is fundamentally unresolvable. Given that expectation, it was fine for Mitchell not to go hard at Ford to undermine her credibility, because at the end of the day, all that matters to keep those undecideds in the fold is for them to be able to say they have no grounds for saying that Kavanaugh was less credible than Ford was.

In other words, Republicans went into this counting on it to be a wash. That’s what Graham basically tried to say when he framed this as a “nice lady who has come forward to tell a hard story,” while adding that she couldn’t provide sufficient chronological and geographical details to furnish grounds for disbelieving Kavanaugh when he says “I’m 100 percent sure I didn’t do it.”

At the same time, as Graham’s tirade shows (note his reference to the mystery of who paid for the polygraph), the specifics of Mitchell’s questioning did appear designed to feed right-wing media material to run with all sorts of weird conspiracy theorizing about how this is all a Democratic plot. As Jeet Heer put it:

Right-wing media can tell the base that the proceedings were a secret success, even as Republicans avoided going hard at at Ford in a way that might have alienated millions of suburban and college-educated white women who will decide the midterms.

But what they did not count on was that Ford’s performance might have a force all its own, independent of whatever Republicans did or did not do to frame the day’s events. In this sense, Graham — and Republicans — really were ambushed. No wonder Graham is so ticked off.

I don’t know if the force of Ford’s performance will be enough to get two Republicans to oppose Kavanaugh’s confirmation, so in this sense, the Republican gamble going in could still pay off. But after Ford’s showing, it seems even clearer today that Republicans will indeed pay a big political price if they do confirm him.

 

[Howl]

Yeah, THAT Doug Jones. Wish with all my heart that there are just two Republicans like him.  And sadly, I don't think credulous Susan Collins will be one of them. 

Edited September 28, 2018 by Howl

[SassyPants]

They are not going to interview Mark Judge.

They are going to vote and confirm that a-hole.

[AnywhereButHere]

What this says is - in the eternal game of he said/she said - once again he is believed over her. Once again she must be mistaken, wrong, at fault. He once again is the poor maligned man whose life will be ruined by an "allegation".

I suppose that this time she's being given more "lip service support" (we believe something happened - just not by him) in an attempt to thread the needle, but the result is the same. She puts herself out there, subjects herself to it all, and loses.

They'll vote him out of committee, and it wouldn't matter if they didn't, since McConnell stated he'd hold the full senate vote no matter what. And hey, even if a few republicans with a conscience voted no, they could still turn around and vote yes in the full senate vote. Oh well, we tried, but since it's before the full senate, we may as well just go with the flow... That's what I believe anyway. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Christine Blasey Ford and the dark side of laughter"

Spoiler

A bold suitor marries a headstrong woman, brands her as his chattel, and denies her food and clothing until she repeats his falsehoods as a docile wife. This is the story Shakespeare tells in “The Taming of the Shrew,” a tale of gender domination.

In the opening, a lord, who assembles the players, slyly wonders how his men will “stay themselves from laughter.” Modern audiences might find the performance more distressing.

On Thursday, Christine Blasey Ford stepped out onto the stage of a congressional hearing and told a panel of mostly male lawmakers that the laughter of two boys had seared her.

She testified to remembering certain details about the bedroom where she alleges that Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when he was 17 and she was 15 — an accusation he denies. She claims that Kavanaugh, urged on by a friend, groped and grinded against her, placing his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.

But most of all, she said, she remembers the laughter of the boys — “the uproarious laughter” — the kind of mirth so morally complex in Shakespeare’s work.

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” said the research psychologist, who wove into her personal account before the Senate Judiciary Committee a scientific defense of her trauma. She spoke of norepinephrine and epinephrine, fight-or-flight hormones released when the body is under stress. She described how “trauma-related experience” locks itself in the brain’s memory center.

In a day of high drama, a scene featuring Ford and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) stood out. The dialogue went like this:

Leahy: Well, then, let’s go back to the incident. What is the strongest memory you have, the strongest memory of the incident, something that you cannot forget? Take whatever time you need.

Ford: Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the laugh — the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.

Leahy: You’ve never forgotten that laughter. You’ve never forgotten them laughing at you.

Ford: They were laughing with each other.

Leahy: And you were the object of the laughter?

Ford: I was, you know, underneath one of them while the two laughed, two friend — two friends having a really good time with one another.

Laughter expresses joy. It forges bonds. It is a hallmark of a good life and helps people endure the bad. Research suggests that laughter may aid short-term memory retention in older adults.

But laughter also has a more sinister aspect, said Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County and the author of “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.” He observed that the two teenagers who went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in 1999 were reportedly laughing as they ran through the hallways, massacring their classmates.

“Raping and pillaging throughout history has been accompanied by laughter,” Provine said. “Laughter has been present during public executions since the beginning of time.”

There is no suggestion that the wrongdoing of which Kavanaugh stands accused is in any way parallel to these acts — or the ones dramatized by Shakespeare — but rather that the reason laughter would have been encoded in Ford’s brain is the same reason it marks both human delight and utter depravity.

“It’s ancient and powerful,” Provine said. While there are scores of different languages, everyone laughs in essentially the same way, he said. And whereas language has to be learned, laughter, like crying, is intuitive. “It’s part of the universal human vocabulary.”

Laughter often derives its power from leaving others out, according to Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London. “Even lovely, warm laughter — it’s not a bonding behavior if it doesn’t leave anyone out.”

Even worse, she said, is when someone is not just excluded from the laughter but made into its object. “Being laughed at — that’s as bad as it can be,” said Scott, who studies the science of voice, speech and laughter.

Ford would remember becoming the object of a joke, particularly under circumstances in which she already felt vulnerable, experts said.

“Fear memories and emotional memories are really strongly encoded in the brain,” said Richard Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University. Ford, he said, “was obviously incredibly afraid, very emotional — and the laughter probably made her feel even more emotional.”

By contrast, Scott said, those doing the laughing may scarcely remember what they found so funny, given how normal a behavior laughing is. “The people laughing can be having an absolutely wonderful time, and it can simultaneously be the worst thing in the world for the person being laughed at,” she said.

Laughter is especially potent when it accompanies intimate forms of violence, Provine said, because it makes clear the power dynamics of the situation.

“There seems to have been a kind of bonding between the boys,” as Ford described it, he said. “They were part of the group. And Dr. Ford was not part of the group.”

Laughter is significant, he added, because it’s an “honest signal — it’s harder to fake and so it’s very persuasive.”

Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University in California, had psychology at her disposal in explaining why the laughter had stayed with her. But literature, film and philosophy also record how laughter can express malice, scorn and contempt. Far from being a simple expression of joy, it has figured as a complicated moral response.

In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the anti-slavery novel that helped bring about the Civil War, Simon Legree, the archetypal slave master and incarnation of evil, “laughed brutally” as he kicked Uncle Tom.

In “Hannibal,” Anthony Hopkins, portraying the serial killer Hannibal Lecter, lets out a throaty snicker after describing hideous acts.

And in “Republic,” Plato argued that laughter was a sign of irrationality, recommending that the guardians of the state should abstain from it, “for ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction.” The Greek philosopher was troubled that Homer had made the deities laugh in his epic poems. “Then if anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less if gods,” Plato wrote.

Laughter, Provine said, is “primal.” Just as its dark side can be indelibly imprinted in memory, it also holds a memorable place in the Western canon.

“I should die with laughing,” says an old man in “The Taming of the Shrew.” Which was the Bard’s reminder that laughter can sometimes appear as a deadly serious act.

 

[Cartmann99]

59 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

Is this fixable if we manage to take back our country? Are we just stuck with him for life? 

Supreme Court justices can be impeached. The process is the same as it is for impeaching a president. 

[SilverBeach]

30 minutes ago, AnywhereButHere said:

Once again she must be mistaken, wrong, at fault.

If it's one thing you don't forget, it's WHO assaulted you. I am outraged that Dr. Ford and the others are being called blatant liars, despite the negative impact of them coming forward. Fuck Kavanaugh and all of his supporters. He's a weak, spineless, angry drunk undeserving of any sympathy who has everything to gain from being a lying asshole.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Kavanaugh is lying. His upbringing explains why."

Spoiler

Brett Kavanaugh may not be telling the whole truth. When President George W. Bush nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006, he told senators that he’d had nothing to do with the war on terror’s detention policies; that was not true. Kavanaugh also claimed under oath, that year and again this month, that he didn’t know that Democratic Party memos a GOP staffer showed him in 2003 were illegally obtained; his emails from that period reveal that these statements were probably false. And it cannot be possible both that the Supreme Court nominee was a well-behaved virgin who never lost control as a young man, as he told Fox News and the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, and that he was an often-drunk member of the “Keg City Club” and a “Renate Alumnius ,” as he seems to have bragged to many people and written into his high school yearbook. Then there are the sexual misconduct allegations against him, which he denies.

How could a man who appears to value honor and the integrity of the legal system explain this apparent mendacity? How could a man brought up in some of our nation’s most storied institutions — Georgetown Prep, Yale College, Yale Law School — dissemble with such ease? The answer lies in the privilege such institutions instill in their members, a privilege that suggests the rules that govern American society are for the common man, not the exceptional one.

The classical root of “privilege,” privus lex, means “private law.” The French aristocracy, for instance, was endowed with privileges, primarily exemption from taxation. Today’s equivalents are not aristocrats, yet they have both the sense and the experience that the rules don’t really apply to them and that they can act without much concern for the consequences. Elite schools like Georgetown Prep and Yale have long cultivated this sensibility in conscious and unconscious ways.

What makes these schools elite is that so few can attend. In the mythologies they construct, only those who are truly exceptional are admitted — precisely because they are not like everyone else. Yale President Peter Salovey, for instance, has welcomed freshmen by telling them that they are “the very best students.” To attend these schools is to be told constantly: You’re special, you’re a member of the elect, you have been chosen because of your outstanding qualities and accomplishments.

Schools are often quite open in affirming the idea that, because you are better, you are not governed by the same dynamics as everyone else. They celebrate their astonishingly low acceptance rates and broadcast lists of notable alumni who have earned their places within the nation’s highest institutions, such as the Supreme Court. I heard these messages constantly when I attended St. Paul’s, one of the most exclusive New England boarding schools, where boys and girls broke rules with impunity, knowing that the school would protect them from the police and that their families would help ensure only the most trivial of consequences.

This narrative of the exceptional student rests on a fiction with pathological consequences: Economist Raj Chetty has shown that children whose parents are in the top 1 percent of earners are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League school than are the children of poorer parents — meaning that, in cases like this, admission is less about talent and more about coming from the right family. In that way, privilege casts inherited advantages as “exceptional” qualities that justify special treatment. No wonder that, when the poor lie, they’re more likely to do so to help others, according to research by Derek D. Rucker, Adam D. Galinsky and David Dubois, whereas when the rich lie, they’re more likely to do it to help themselves.

Such selfish tendencies extend well beyond the way the privileged use untruths to their advantage. According to research by psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, elites’ sense of their own exceptionalism helps instill within them a tendency to be less compassionate. This may have its roots in the fact that there seem to be two different sets of consequences for the rich and the rest. Take drug use. While the poor are no more likely to use drugs (in fact, among young people, it’s the richer who are more likely to drink alcohol or smoke marijuana), they are far more likely to be imprisoned for it, and they experience vastly disproportionate imprisonment for all crimes compared with the wealthy. In the end, it is impossible to separate success from class.

Kavanaugh’s privilege runs deep, and it shows. He grew up in a wealthy Washington suburb where his father spent three decades as CEO of a trade association. There has been a sense among his supporters that his place is deserved, which mirrors the climate of aristocratic inheritance he grew up around. His peers from the party of personal responsibility have largely rallied around him, seeking to protect his privilege. As a Bush-era White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, put it: “How much in society should any of us be held liable today when we lived a good life, an upstanding life by all accounts, and then something that maybe is an arguable issue took place in high school? Should that deny us chances later in life?” American Conservative editor Rod Dreher wondered “why the loutish drunken behavior of a 17 year old high school boy has anything to tell us about the character of a 53 year old judge.”

This collective agreement that accountability doesn’t apply to Kavanaugh (and, by extension, anybody in a similar position who was a youthful delinquent) may help explain why he seems to believe he can lie with impunity — a trend he continued on Thursday, when he informed senators he hadn’t seen the testimony of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, even though a committee aide told the Wall Street Journal he’d been watching. In his furious interview with the panel that afternoon, Kavanaugh appeared astonished that anybody might impugn his character or try to keep him from the seat he is entitled to. “I’m never going to get my reputation back,” he complained.

Yet we cannot ignore that instead of dedicating his life to the relentless accumulation of wealth, Kavanaugh has pursued a career of public service. As a Justice Department aide to Kenneth Starr and, later, a judge, he earned a fraction of what he might have in the private sector. This represents another critical lesson of elite schools: servant leadership. The mission statement of my alma mater, for instance, professes “a commitment to engage as servant leaders in a complex world.” You are bred to be a leader who serves a higher ideal than your own advantage. Whatever you believe of his politics or his background, Kavanaugh’s commitment to public service cannot be denied.

While they seem contradictory, servant leadership and privilege are often bedfellows. Both suggest not a commonality with the ordinary American, but instead a standing above or in front of Everyman. Both justify locating power within a small elite because this elite is better equipped to lead. (Retired justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have hand-picked Kavanaugh as his successor — a rather astonishing circumvention of the democratic process and the separation of powers.) Both have at their core not a commitment to shared democracy but a moral imperative to lead because of one’s exceptional qualities. And both allow space for lying in service of the greater good. Privilege means that things like perjury aren’t wrong under one’s own private law.

 

[SassyPants]

This is the worst case of affluenza every!

[GreyhoundFan]

Senator Whitehouse read the letter from the American Bar Association, requesting the vote be put on hold until the FBI investigates and asked for it to be put into the record. Grasshole said it didn't matter because it was only signed by the president of the ABA, not every member. ARGH.

[Ais]

 I've been on the go all day and just got a chance to put on the news. 

Is this really happening? This exact situation is why I found the handmaid's tale so frightening. In this political climate Gilead is entirely possible and I feel like I'm watching its birth 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Brett Kavanaugh likes beer, but not questions about his drinking habits"

Spoiler

By the end of Thursday’s hours-long Senate hearing, one fact about Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was abundantly clear: He likes beer.

“I drank beer with my friends,” Kavanaugh told senators in his opening statement, describing his younger days. “Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes others did. I liked beer. I still like beer.”

Alcohol, specifically how much Kavanaugh drank, was at the center of the Judiciary Committee’s hearing dedicated to assessing the credibility of sexual assault allegations brought against the judge by Christine Blasey Ford.

Ford alleges that she was pinned to a bed by Kavanaugh, who was “stumbling drunk,” at a party when they were both teenagers in the early 1980s. Similarly, the other two women who have come forward with accusations of sexual misconduct claim that Kavanaugh was drinking during the alleged events. Former college classmates have used words such as “sloppy” and “frequently, incoherently drunk” to describe Kavanaugh, whose high school senior yearbook page also includes references to drinking and parties.

On Thursday, Kavanaugh firmly proclaimed that he never sexually assaulted anyone.

But when it came to alcohol consumption, his answers became vague and his frustration showed.

In some instances, when faced with questions related to drinking too much, many noticed that Kavanaugh appeared “defensive” and “evasive,” not providing direct answers or throwing questions back at the senators who asked them.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), for example, asked whether his drinking ever caused him to be unable to remember events, and he became insolent.

“You’re asking about blackout. I don’t know, have you?” he said.

Apart from the normal inclination of anyone not wanting to be perceived as an excessive drinker, it’s possible Kavanaugh’s answers were more calculated. Any acknowledgment of excessive drinking and drunkenness would help corroborate the accounts put forth by his accusers of what happened during his high school and college years. The suggestion that he was subject to blacking out could be used to show that he was in no position to know one way or the other what he had allegedly done to Ford. It could have undermined his claims of utter certainty that he never was at the gathering described by Ford.

Attempts to deal with suggestions of drunken behavior began several days ago when Kavanaugh and his wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, sat for a deeply personal interview with Fox News. During the interview, Kavanaugh described himself as a churchgoing scholar-athlete who did occasionally drink beer but had never blacked out.

He returned to the subject in his opening statement: “I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out, and I never sexually assaulted anyone,” he said.

But when Rachel Mitchell, the Arizona prosecutor tapped by Republican senators to question Kavanaugh and Ford, asked the judge what he considered “too many beers,” Kavanaugh faltered.

“I don’t know,” he said, pausing. “Uh, you know, whatever the chart says — uh, blood-alcohol chart.”

Kavanaugh acknowledged that he was one of the people who might have had “too many beers on occasion,” but then Mitchell asked whether he had ever passed out from drinking.

Stammering, Kavanaugh responded, “Passed out would be no, but I’ve gone to sleep. But I’ve never blacked out. That’s the allegation . . . and that’s wrong.”

“Did anyone ever tell you about something that happened in your presence that you didn’t remember during a time that you had been drinking?” she asked.

“No. . . . We drank beer and . . . so did, I think, the vast majority of people our age at the time. In any event, we drank beer and still do, so, whatever, yeah,” he said, trailing off.

As the hearing went on, Kavanaugh appeared to become increasingly frustrated by questions about his drinking.

Take, for example, when Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) brought up a book written by Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge called “Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk.” In the book, Judge, who Ford alleges witnessed Kavanaugh attack her, chronicled his recovery from alcoholism, The Washington Post’s Emma Brown reported. While Kavanaugh is not mentioned in the book, there is a character named “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” who “puked in someone’s car” and “passed out on his way back from a party.”

Leahy asked Kavanaugh whether he was the person Judge had written about. Kavanaugh did not give a direct answer and engaged in a heated back-and-forth with Leahy.

“Judge Kavanaugh, I’m trying to get a straight answer from you under oath,” Leahy finally said. “Are you Bart O’Kavanaugh that he’s referring to: Yes or no?”

“You’d have to ask him,” Kavanaugh said.

Then Leahy turned to Kavanaugh’s yearbook entry.

“In your yearbook, you talked about drinking and sexual exploits, did you not?” Leahy asked.

“Let me take a step back and explain high school. I was number one in the class,” Kavanaugh said, before Leahy cut him off. The pair started talking over each other until Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) intervened, allowing Kavanaugh to finish answering.

Kavanaugh launched into a lengthy description of his high school activities, which included excelling in academics, playing multiple sports and volunteering.

“Does this yearbook reflect your focus on academics and your respect for women?” Leahy asked. “That’s easy. Yes or no.”

Parts of the yearbook, Kavanaugh said, were treated by students and editors as “farce” and “exaggeration.”

“Yes, of course, we went to parties and the yearbook page describes that and kind of makes fun of it,” he said. “If we want to sit here and talk about whether a Supreme Court nomination should be based on a high school yearbook page, I think that’s taken us to a new level of absurdity.”

The yearbook came up again when Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) had Kavanaugh decode the slang in his entry — believed to be yet another example of the party culture in which he is accused of partaking — and the inquiry naturally turned to alcohol.

“So the vomiting that you reference in the ‘Ralph Club’ reference: related to the consumption of alcohol?” Whitehouse asked.

Kavanaugh: “Senator, I was the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school. Captain of the varsity basketball team. Got in Yale College. When I got into Yale College, got into Yale Law School. I’ve worked my tail off.”

Whitehouse repeated his initial question, and Kavanaugh, talking over him, hastened to claim he already answered it.

“Did it relate to alcohol? You haven’t answered that,” Whitehouse said.

“I like beer,” Kavanaugh said loudly. He added: “Do you like beer, Senator, or not? What do you like to drink?”

As Whitehouse attempted to move on to his next question, Kavanaugh asked again, “Senator, what do you like to drink?”

Kavanaugh’s hostility returned when he engaged with Klobuchar, the Democratic senator, in what was arguably his lowest moment throughout the entire hearing.

Things started smoothly as Kavanaugh praised Klobuchar, saying he has “a lot of respect for” her. He then respectfully listened to Klobuchar explain how her father had “struggled with alcoholism” and is still in Alcoholics Anonymous at 90 years old.

But when she started talking about how Kavanaugh’s freshman year roommate and former college peers had characterized his behavior when drinking, he, once again, became defensive.

He called into question his old roommate’s credibility and launched into a lengthy and tangential story about the dynamics of his freshman year dorm room, until Klobuchar was forced to cut him off to ask her question.

“Was there ever a time when you drank so much that you couldn’t remember what happened, or part of what happened, the night before?” she asked.

“No, I remember what happened and I think you’ve probably had beer, Senator,” Kavanaugh said, as Klobuchar spoke over him.

Klobuchar: “So you’re saying there’s never been a case where you drank so much that you didn’t remember what happened the night before or part of what happened?”

Kavanaugh: “It’s — you’re asking about, you know, blackout. I don’t know. Have you?”

Klobuchar: “Could you answer the question, Judge? . . . So . . . that’s not happened? Is that your answer?”

Kavanaugh: “Yeah, and I’m curious if you have.”

Clearly uncomfortable, Klobuchar released a short laugh before responding, “I have no drinking problem, Judge.”

“Yeah, nor do I,” Kavanaugh said with a smile.

The exchange was described by The Post’s Jennifer Rubin as “a moment of singular cruelty and disrespect.” On social media, people were both shocked and outraged.

New York Magazine reporter Cristian Farias described it as “surreal.”

When the hearing resumed after a recess, Kavanaugh apologized to Klobuchar.

“She asked me a question at the end that I responded by asking her a question,” he said. He added: “Sorry I did that. This is a tough process. I’m sorry about that.”

Klobuchar accepted the apology.

“I appreciate that,” she said. “I would like to add that when you have a parent that’s an alcoholic, you’re pretty careful about drinking.”

 

[AmazonGrace]

About the calendar :https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-most-shocking-findings-in-yesterdays-drama

By Josh Marshall

Spoiler

 

September 28, 2018 9:33 am

Yesterday was a compendium of so many things in our public life. There are too many things that could be said about it. Let me start now with one observation on the entirety of the day and what I think was the most critical development in terms of specific new evidence that really demands some investigation.

In the morning, you had what appeared to be a near universal sense that Christine Blasey Ford was credible and compelling. Republicans who are intent and fast-tracking a vote before Kavanaugh loses more support were grim and crestfallen. Kavanaugh’s performance told us little new that we didn’t know but was filled with rage, grievance and aggression. Senate Republicans were close to ecstatic in response and appear to remain so this morning. That in itself is among the most telling things. Kavanaugh decided to emulate Trump – right down to the conspiracy theories, casual lying and aggressive counter-attacks against political enemies. It all seemed to come naturally. And Senate Republicans loved it. The reaction alone – to a performance that cannot possibly ever command even the most limited respect on the Court from those Kavanaugh explicitly terms his political enemies – is the most telling political takeaway from yesterday.

But there is an entirely different aspect of what emerged yesterday, something that caught my attention immediately and which others have since found more on. Kavanaugh rested his aggressive defense on the claim that he and Blasey Ford weren’t even in the same social circles and that he didn’t even attend parties like the one she describes in the summer in question. But little discussed in the hearing was significant new evidence about what connected them and a party that seems to match it closely.

Remember that wild Ed Whelan debacle where Kavanaugh’s close friend came up with this highly speculative theory which pointed the finger of blame at a classmate named Chris Garrett, now a middle school teacher in Georgia. It turns out he wasn’t some random guy from the yearbook. He was apparently one of Kavanaugh’s group of friends, seemingly a fairly good friend. He shows up with him in the yearbook and he’s referenced repeatedly in Kavanaugh’s calendar/diary under the nickname “Squi”. Both Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh identified him as such. It turns out that around this time he was also dating Christine Blasey. This is needless to say a pretty clear way the two social worlds came together.

There is in fact a reference to a pre-party get together on July 1st, 1982 in that calendar that sounds a lot like the event Blasey Ford describes. It has Kavanaugh, Mark Judge and at least one (“PJ”) of the other boys Blasey Ford said in her initial letter were there. You can see the entry here.

Now, all we can really say based on this bit of evidence is that Kavanaugh clearly was attending parties like the one Blasey Ford described at that time, something that is not at all incriminating in itself but which is nevertheless something Kavanaugh has denied. But there is actually more suggestive evidence. And the best walk through it comes in a series of article yesterday by the Post’s Philip Bump. Here is one on information in Mark Judge’s book which appears to confirm one element of Blasey Ford’s account. Here is a second one. And here is the one specifically about this party. As Bump notes, coincidentally or not, it was after Rachel Mitchell’s questioning on this party that her participation in the hearing abruptly ended.

 

I don’t believe it is coincidental that the man Ed Whelan chose to publicly accuse, apparently working in concert Leonard Leo of The Federalist Society and quite possibly Kavanaugh himself, happened to be someone who was actually a good friend of Kavanaugh’s and happened to be dating Blasey Ford at around the same time. There is a connection here.

The relevant point for us is not that this is necessarily the date that the incident happened or that we could get closer to corroboration or exoneration based on these details. It is that there is an obvious place to start for the FBI to review these details as part of a reopened background check.

What seems like highly relevant information is sitting right there and they’re refusing to look at it. Senate Republicans are now rushing to a final floor vote on Monday. This needs to be examined and there is little no time to lose.