Kavanaugh/Blasey Ford Sexual Assault Allegations Hearing

[AmazonGrace]

So Kavanaugh said that he first learned of the Ramirez allegations from New Yorker but apparently he was asking old friends about her before the article came out.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/mutual-friend-ramirez-kavanaugh-anxious-come-forward-evidence-n915566

[fraurosena]

According to the transcript I posted above, at the time of dr. Ford's hearing the Judiciary Committee already had SIX separate allegations of sexual assault, misconduct and rape against Kavanaugh in their possession. 

Six allegations known to the Judiciary Committee. Six.

And they still want to confirm him. 

[TuringMachine]

The thing is, passing on kavanaugh would be letting the democrats "win". And we can't have that

[Drala]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

According to the transcript I posted above, at the time of dr. Ford's hearing the Judiciary Committee already had SIX separate allegations of sexual assault, misconduct and rape against Kavanaugh in their possession. 

Six allegations known to the Judiciary Committee. Six.

And they still want to confirm him. 

Kavenaugh is a total partisan stooge who is expected to vote against any Justice Dept indictment of the president if the matter comes before the Supreme Court, and it will, if the Mueller investigation leads to an indictment.  

[SassyPants]

Pull the nomination. That is the only viable choice.

If he was such a man of character, he would push the eject button himself.

 

[AmazonGrace]

The choir boy was focusing on his studies in a bar fight in 1985. Unsurprisingly, one of the fellas who said he didn't drink much was also involved in this brawl.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/us/politics/kavanaugh-bar-fight.html

Kavanaugh Was Questioned by Police After Bar Fight in 1985

By Emily Bazelon and Ben Protess

Oct. 1, 2018

NEW HAVEN — As an undergraduate student at Yale, Brett M. Kavanaugh was involved in an altercation at a local bar during which he was accused of throwing ice on another patron, according to a police report.

Spoiler

 

The incident, which occurred in September 1985 during Mr. Kavanaugh’s junior year, resulted in Mr. Kavanaugh and four other men being questioned by the New Haven Police Department. Mr. Kavanaugh was not arrested, but the police report stated that a 21-year-old man accused Mr. Kavanaugh of throwing ice on him “for some unknown reason.”

A witness to the fight said that Chris Dudley, a Yale basketball player who was friends with Mr. Kavanaugh, then hit the man in the ear with a glass, according to the police report, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The report said that the victim, Dom Cozzolino, “was bleeding from the right ear” and was later treated at a local hospital. A detective was notified of the incident at 1:20 a.m.

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Mr. Dudley denied the accusation, according to the report. For his part, speaking to the officers, Mr. Kavanaugh did not want “to say if he threw the ice or not,” the police report said.

The report referred to the altercation, which occurred at a bar called Demery’s, as “an assault.” It did not say whether anyone was arrested, and there is no indication that charges were filed.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday. Mr. Dudley did not respond to phone and email messages. Reached by text message, Mr. Cozzolino declined to comment.

The outlines of the incident were first referred to in a statement issued on Sunday by Chad Ludington, one of Judge Kavanaugh’s college classmates and a member of the Yale basketball team.

“On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face,” Mr. Ludington said in the statement. Mr. Ludington, a college professor at North Carolina State, said he came forward because he believed Judge Kavanaugh had mischaracterized the extent of his drinking at Yale.

 

Mr. Ludington said that he had been in touch with the F.B.I.

He said that the altercation happened after a UB40 concert, when he and a group of people went to Demery’s and were drinking pints. At one point, they were sitting near a man who, they thought, resembled Ali Campbell, the lead singer of UB40.

“We’re trying to figure out if it’s him,” he said.

When the man noticed Mr. Ludington, Mr. Kavanaugh and the others looking at him, he objected and aggressively asked them to stop, Mr. Ludington said.

It was then, he said, that Mr. Kavanaugh “threw his beer at the guy.”

“The guy swung at Brett,” Mr. Ludington continued. At that point, Mr. Dudley “took his beer and smashed it into the head of the guy, who by now had Brett in an embrace. I then tried to pull Chris back, and a bunch of other guys tried to pull the other guy back. I don’t know what Brett was doing in the melee, but there was blood, there was glass, there was beer and there was some shouting, and the police showed up.”

Demery’s, which closed in 1994, was a well-known local bar that served big slices of pizza, and cheap beer, especially after 9 p.m. It drew a crowd that included “older Yalies and younger ones with good fake IDs,” according to thepolitic.org.

Mr. Dudley, who after Yale went on to the N.B.A., has spoken out in support of Judge Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and disputed reports that he drank excessively.

Several Yale classmates, including a former roommate and Mr. Ludington, have described Judge Kavanaugh as sometimes aggressive when he was drinking.

 

 

[SassyPants]

51 minutes ago, TuringMachine said:

The thing is, passing on kavanaugh would be letting the democrats "win". And we can't have that

But there have to be other white, Christian, conservative candidates who would willing become Trump's puppet. 

Come on-

[formergothardite]

15 minutes ago, SassyPants said:

But there have to be other white, Christian, conservative candidates who would willing become Trump's puppet. 

Come on-

There has to be a mountain of them that they can use! I guess they are struggling to find someone quite as corrupt as Kavanaugh. 

[fraurosena]

Somebody paid off Kavanaugh’s considerable debts. That (Russian?) someone wants a return on their investment. You can bet they are working hard behind the scenes to get what they want.

[formergothardite]

For judges at that level it might be hard to find someone who is straight up corrupt in the way they need. The other guy Trump stuck on the SC is conservative, but I don't get the corrupt to the core vibe from him. I think he would do his own thing if he felt led. Kavanaugh is corrupt and will do as they wish while putting pressure on the other judges to do as they wish. 

I'm not sure Trump understands the reasoning behind pushing Kavanaugh. I can see him not being a fan of his crying and wailing and not grasping that if a full investigation is done too many skeletons will be found and Kavanaugh won't be usable. 

[fraurosena]

Seth Abramson has an (at the time I’m posting it) ongeïnformeerd thread about the news that Kavanaugh knew about the Ramirez allegation in July, and perjured himself by lying to the Senate that he only heard of it late September.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘The trauma for a man’: Male fury and fear rises in GOP in defense of Kavanaugh"

Spoiler

The sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh have sparked a wave of unbridled anger and anxiety from many Republican men, who say they are in danger of being swept up by false accusers who are biased against them.

From President Trump to his namesake son to Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), the howls of outrage crystallize a strong current of grievance within a party whose leadership is almost entirely white and overwhelmingly male — and which does not make a secret of its fear that demographic shifts and cultural convulsions could jeopardize its grip on power.

This eruption of male resentment now seems likely to play a defining role in the midterm elections just five weeks away, contrasting with a burst of enthusiasm among women propelling Democratic campaigns and inspired by the national #MeToo reckoning over sexual assault and gender roles.

“I’ve got boys and I’ve got girls, and when I see what’s going on right now, it’s scary,” Donald Trump Jr., a father of five small children, said in an interview with DailyMailTV aired Monday.

Asked whether he was more worried about his sons or daughters, Trump Jr. said, “Right now, I’d say my sons.”

The rallying cry was Kavanaugh’s enraged plea of innocence before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which heard emotional testimony from Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a house in suburban Maryland when he was 17 and she was 15.

Trump has defended Kavanaugh and said the accusations by Ford and two other women are unfair to the judge and his family. The president — who himself has denied claims of sexual assault by more than a dozen women — has repeatedly stood behind other accused men in positions of power, including former Senate candidate Roy Moore after the Alabama Republican was accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls.

“The trauma for a man that’s never had any accusation — he’s never had a bad statement about him,” Trump told reporters on Monday, sympathizing with Kavanaugh’s experience. “It’s unfair to him at this point. What his wife is going through, what his beautiful children are going through is not describable.”

Veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz said that among Republicans, “There is a feeling of being guilty until proven innocent. In this era of #MeToo, there are a lot of men — and some women — who believe that justice no longer exists in America, that the accusation is enough to destroy someone’s career and someone’s life. That wasn’t manifesting itself politically until” late last week.

Kavanaugh’s defenders, reflecting widespread feelings among conservatives nationally, are furious about what they see as a broad-brush approach to sexual misconduct allegations. They say the federal judge is being caught in a #MeToo riptide and unfairly grouped with serial predators — such as entertainer Bill Cosby, who has been accused of sexual assault or harassment by more than 60 women and was sentenced last week to three to 10 years in prison for drugging and assaulting one of them.

“I think you’re trying to portray him as a stumbling, bumbling drunk, gang rapist, who during high school and college was Bill Cosby,” Graham said Sunday to host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”

Public opinion on Kavanaugh breaks down along gender lines. Women oppose his confirmation, 55 percent to 37 percent, while men support it, 49 percent to 40 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Monday. The survey found that 48 percent of American voters most believe Ford, while 41 percent most believe Kavanaugh.

In the 2016 election, Trump won 53 percent of men to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s 41 percent, and he has sought to galvanize these supporters with what he calls a Democratic “con job” on his handpicked Supreme Court nominee.

The right has come alive with impassioned defenses of Kavanaugh in recent days. Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, whose program for years has largely defined the GOP’s white male id, has unleashed a torrent of criticism on the air — such as his riff last week on “militant feminism.”

“These women are angry,” Limbaugh said. “Something has happened to them in their lives, and their rage and anger, they take it out now on the country or on all men or men in ‘the powerful majority,’ which is white Christian men and so forth.”

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter bemoaned the “snickering at white men” in her syndicated column last week and insisted that “there has never been a more pacific, less rapey creature than the white male of Western European descent.”

“Can we please, for the love of God, drop the painfully trite, mind-numbing cliche about ‘white men,’ as if somehow their whiteness makes evil even eviler?” Coulter wrote.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) tweeted after the Kavanaugh hearing that “ ‘Old white men’ are relentlessly being racially and generationally profiled by the ‘tolerant’ Left” and that media outlets have “almost universally profiled and stigmatized Republican Senators.”

Jennifer Palmieri, a Democratic strategist and author of “Dear Madam President,” a book about reimagining women in leadership roles, said the nation’s fast-changing culture can be unsettling and indeed frightening to men in power.

“A lot of white men don’t know what it’s like to feel threatened, powerless and frustrated,” said Palmieri, former communications director for Clinton’s campaign. “As we go through the reckoning of this lopsided power balance, there’s going to be a lot more of this.”

The Republican Party has long identified with more traditional white males, such as former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But strategists say it is now turning more toward combative male candidates in the mold of Trump, with allegations of misconduct interpreted by many within the party not as liabilities but as unfair political attacks.

“We’re a party of angry, older white men at a time when our country is going through tremendous demographic change,” Republican strategist John Weaver said, predicting that the GOP would suffer the consequences in future elections.

The sounds and images of angry men could have a lasting impact on the Republican brand. Kavanaugh’s pitched testimony has quickly gone from must-see live television to cultural touchstone. On NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend, actor Matt Damon portrayed Kavanaugh in the show’s opening sketch as a beer-guzzling frat boy whose hero was “Clint Eastwood’s character in ‘Gran Torino,’ ” a 2008 film about an older white man who has contempt for aspects of diversity.

The shift in political gravity for Republicans helps explain the searing denouncement by Graham in last week’s Senate hearing. His extraordinary diatribe — reenacted on “Saturday Night Live” by a scowling Kate McKinnon — was, in essence, a defense of men who had been stewing about the charges against Kavanaugh.

“I know I’m a single white male from South Carolina and I’m told I should shut up, but I will not shut up, if that’s okay,” Graham said at the hearing, adding that the experience had been “hell” for Kavanaugh and “the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.”

Those remarks won Graham a rush of praise from men in his solidly Republican state and from conservative activists nationally.

“People say, ‘Lindsey said what I was thinking,’ ” said Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman and Graham ally. “That’s powerful, and that’s all over the country. . . . It’s become a fairness issue to the people in the hinterlands. They don’t think Kavanaugh has been treated fairly.”

Others, however, saw the cold calculation of a lawmaker playing to stereotypes and raw emotions to gain a political edge.

“It’s not just that white men are allowed to be angry and women are not; it’s that white men’s anger can be used to their benefit,” wrote Rebecca Traister, author of “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.” “We reflexively understand the anger of white men, especially when used to convey how unfairly they’ve been treated, as righteous and correct.”

Inside the conservative movement and on its fringes, an intense discussion has long been underway about gender and the perceived assault on men. Fox News commentator Ben Shapiro, who hosts a popular podcast and TV program, has been one of the higher profile voices, sharply criticizing a culture where he sees “men out in the cold” and “searching for meaning.”

“The age of emasculation cannot last,” Shapiro has written. “It will eventually boil over into violence, sink away into irrelevance,” or return to traditional mores.

Beyond Shapiro, University of Toronto clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has drawn thousands of young conservative men to his lectures across the United States, railing against the effects of feminism and urging men to speak up for themselves. “Boys are suffering in the modern world,” he has told his followers.

On Reddit, a hugely popular online discussion website, hordes of men, many of them libertarian or Republican, weigh in on forums focused on topics such as “men’s rights” and “men’s liberation.”

Some conservative women also have joined the chorus of outrage over what they see as the encroachment of liberal feminism into American life.

“I disagree with Senator Mazie Hirono, who said men should just shut up. Men deserved to be listened to,” said attorney Helgi Walker, a longtime friend of Kavanaugh who worked with him in the White House. “Due process means listening to everybody. It doesn’t mean men are totally invalidated.”

 

[AmazonGrace]

Rape culture on steroids 

 

[AmazonGrace]

When you're not welcome in Harvard 

 

[fraurosena]

Ms Ramirez’ allegation is going to be the cause of his downfall. 

How can the GOP confirm a proven perjuror and corroborated sexual assaulter, without complete and utter annihilation in the Midterms? They may be petulant and pitiful angry old white men, but they must realize that there is no way a Kavanaugh confirmation could end well.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AnnaSofia]

10 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Somebody paid off Kavanaugh’s considerable debts. That (Russian?) someone wants a return on their investment. You can bet they are working hard behind the scenes to get what they want.

 

[formergothardite]

They really thought they would get him in in a week or so and are freaking out because women have ruined their plans. I bet Mitch is pissed that they FBI investigation has expanded. At this point if they drop him and start with someone new could they get that person in in time to rule on that case? 

[Drala]

11 hours ago, formergothardite said:

For judges at that level it might be hard to find someone who is straight up corrupt in the way they need. The other guy Trump stuck on the SC is conservative, but I don't get the corrupt to the core vibe from him. I think he would do his own thing if he felt led. Kavanaugh is corrupt and will do as they wish while putting pressure on the other judges to do as they wish. 

I'm not sure Trump understands the reasoning behind pushing Kavanaugh. I can see him not being a fan of his crying and wailing and not grasping that if a full investigation is done too many skeletons will be found and Kavanaugh won't be usable. 

I agree.  I'm not sure some of the other candidates are as corrupt in the way Kavenaugh is.  Just because a judge is conservative doesn't mean s/he will rule on cases along strict partisan lines.  I'm under the impression that many conservative jurists are strong proponents of rule of law, the idea that no one, not even the president, is above the law.  Kavenaugh is on record saying he doesn't think the Justice Dept. can indict a sitting president.  I wasn't too worried about the possibility he would vote against indicting the president if he were seated on the Supreme Court because I think he would be outvoted by Chief Justice Roberts, who is not a total partisan flunky.  

Edited October 2, 2018 by Drala

[Drala]

Karma is a bitch.

 

[Howl]

@Drala, this is getting so delicious.  That article has numerous bombshells that could (to mix metaphors) torpedo the Kavanaugh nomination. 

That said, it boils down to who on the judicial committee is going to vote to move it to a full Senate vote and McConnell is a powerful arm twister who is not currently ceding anything to anybody and is still totally committed to Kavanaugh on the SC before midterms. Never, ever mis-underestimate (!) this guy's power. 

Then we have the sweet, dear but ridiculously credulous Susan Collins, who seems willing to believe anything, like someone telling her "Roe v. Wade is settled law."  Jeff Flake?  Who knows. 

Here's something else that's been tugging at my mind.  Brett Kavanaugh is 53 and he and Ashley (43) have been married 14 years.  That means he was 39-ish when he married for (presumably) the first time.  That's a late marriage in anyone's book, so he was a bachelor for a loooooong time.  Was he dating? LTR?  Who were the women (or men)  in his life for all of those years? 

First, I'm not excusing Kavanaugh's horrible behavior in his early life.  I know numerous people who were pretty wild in high school, college and into their early 20s who settled in to lead exemplary and productive lives; time has a way of wearing down the rough edges.  Kavanaugh may well fit that pattern.  However, I do have a lingering suspicion that Kavanaugh is a very high functioning alcoholic or dry drunk; his behavior at the hearing just has that unmistakable vibe to it.  Maybe he was coached to come out swinging, but his arrogant, demeaning response to women senators who questioned him can never be excused or explained away. 

Also, from photos in that hearing, his wife looks totally depressed.  Just another one of those instances where the spouse and kids are trotted out to stand by their man.  I'm also sad that the girls are obviously at an age where they and their friends are immersed in social media.  Even if their parents are able to shield them from the worst of it, their friends could well have full access. Whatever the failings of a parent in the adult world, it's sad when it affects the kids. 

 

Edited October 2, 2018 by Howl

[fraurosena]

26 minutes ago, Howl said:

Here's something else that's been tugging at my mind.  Brett Kavanaugh is 53 and he and Ashley (43) have been married 14 years.  That means he was 39-ish when he married for (presumably) the first time.  That's a late marriage in anyone's book, so he was a bachelor for a loooooong time.  Was he dating? LTR?  Who were the women (or men)  in his life for all of those years? 

Good points! The nasty corner of my mind started bleeping when I read that he was a bachelor until a year after Bush nominated him for circuit judge (he was 38 in 2003) . Was that purely coincidental, or did he marry at that precise moment in order to have a certain wholesome image that would be productive to his nomination? Is it also purely coincidental that bestie Mark Judge to this day remains a bachelor?

Yah, that is nasty of me. Still... 

[SassyPants]

13 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Somebody paid off Kavanaugh’s considerable debts. That (Russian?) someone wants a return on their investment. You can bet they are working hard behind the scenes to get what they want.

And do we know how he accumulated these debts?

[GreyhoundFan]

4 minutes ago, SassyPants said:

And do we know how he accumulated these debts?

All that beer doesn't come cheap.

[fraurosena]

1 minute ago, SassyPants said:

And do we know how he accumulated these debts?

That is also a big unknown. There are rumors that he's a gambler, but nothing has been substantiated. The only thing we can definitively say is that his finances are extremely dodgy. I don't remember the precise details, but it's been recently posted here in one of his threads. Something about buying a house without having the financial means, and other stuff that I'm not clear on right now.