Kavanaugh/Blasey Ford Sexual Assault Allegations Hearing

[Drala]

It's obvious KavNo was lying about all kinds of stuff.  I guess we'll find out how much due diligence went into the FBI investigation/report by how Manchin decides to vote.

 

[AmazonGrace]

To quote MetallicaNothing really matters 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Fucking douche cannons in the Senste just did this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-on-senate-panel-release-explicit-statement-about-kavanaugh-accusers-sex-life/2018/10/02/714d8abc-c685-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html

I fucking hate these people.

And attention Apple for the last goddamn time I did not mean ducking.

They really are fucking asshole wankers. (Pardon my french.)

They set her up.

[AuntK]

On 10/2/2018 at 1:08 PM, Cartmann99 said:

I originally read about this in an article that @GreyhoundFan posted, but it's crazy enough to deserve a second airing:

Lindsey, I get that you want to be the Attorney General, but you are just making a fool of yourself. The longer this shitshow rolls on, the more time there is for people who know Kavanaugh's secrets to decide to start spilling their guts.

And people who know Lindsey's secret will start spilling their guts!

[47of74]

And people who know Lindsey's secret will start spilling their guts!

Someone must have quite the компрометирующий материал on Lindsey Beauregard Graham give how much Graham is falling over himself to praise fuck face and Kavadouche[emoji769].

[GreyhoundFan]

The choir boy in his own handwriting: "Kavanaugh’s 1983 Letter Offers Inside Look at High School Clique"

Spoiler

The beachfront property was rented, the guests were invited and an ever-organized Brett M. Kavanaugh had some advice for the seven Georgetown Preparatory School classmates who would be joining him for the weeklong escapade.

In a 1983 letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, the young Judge Kavanaugh warned his friends of the danger of eviction from an Ocean City, Md., condo. In a neatly written postscript, he added: Whoever arrived first at the condo should “warn the neighbors that we’re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us. Advise them to go about 30 miles...”

More than three decades later, the elite, privileged high school world that Judge Kavanaugh inhabited is the focus of international attention. He has been accused of sexual assault during his time at Georgetown Prep — claims that have delayed, and threatened to derail, his confirmation to the Supreme Court. Judge Kavanaugh denies the allegations.

... < pictures of the handwritten letter>

Recent interviews with more than a dozen classmates and friends from that time depict Judge Kavanaugh as a member of a small clique of football players who dominated Georgetown Prep’s work-hard, play-hard culture. His circle celebrated a culture of heavy drinking, even by the standards of that era.

Now several members of that group — still tightknit decades later — are caught up in the controversy surrounding Judge Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.

With the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s background check into the judge reopened, two of his closest high school friends, Mark Judge and Patrick J. Smyth, have been interviewed by F.B.I. agents. Another, Tim Gaudette, was named in Judge Kavanaugh’s testimony as the host of a July 1982 gathering, around the time that Christine Blasey Ford says she was assaulted. Mr. Gaudette has hired a lawyer to represent him and was interviewed by the F.B.I. on Tuesday, the lawyer said.

A different classmate, who was friendly with Judge Kavanaugh and requested anonymity to protect his business interests, said he had reached out to the F.B.I. because he believes the judge misrepresented the extent of his drinking during his Senate testimony last week.

Even the faculty adviser to Georgetown Prep’s 1983 yearbook — a publication littered with debasing comments about women and references to drunken debauchery — has been wondering whether he will hear from the F.B.I., a family member said.

The judge has said that he attended high school parties. “Sometimes I had too many beers,” he testified, adding that he has “cringed” at some of his behavior back then. But his public statements don’t fully capture the binge-drinking culture in which classmates say he was a core participant.

Parties, in the backyards of classmates’ suburban homes when their parents were away, would often attract hundreds of students from nearby private schools, his classmates recall. Five or 10 kegs would be procured and, if all went as planned, drained by the end of the night.

One night during his senior year, according to classmates who witnessed it, Judge Kavanaugh triumphantly hoisted an empty beer keg above his head, in recognition that he and his friends were well on their way to reaching their goal of polishing off 100 kegs during the academic year — an achievement they later boasted about in their yearbook.

Four Georgetown Prep classmates said they saw Judge Kavanaugh and his friends partake in binge-drinking rituals many weekends in which other partygoers saw them inebriated, even having difficulty standing. Three of those classmates signed a July letter, along with more than 150 other alumni, that endorsed him for the Supreme Court.

Through his lawyers, Judge Kavanaugh declined to comment for this article, other than to say of his letter: “This is a note I wrote to organize ‘Beach Week’ in the summer of 1983.”

Kerri Kupec, a White House spokeswoman, said: “It seems The New York Times is committed to embarrassing Judge Kavanaugh with three-decade-old stories of adolescent drinking.”

Judge Kavanaugh, an only child and sports fanatic, surrounded himself in high school with athletes. Among his closest friends, classmates said, were Mr. Judge, Christopher C. Garrett and Don Urgo Jr. Other members of the clique included Mr. Gaudette and DeLancey Davis.

“Academically, athletically and socially, we all became literally almost like brothers,” Mr. Urgo said in an interview with The Times in July. He got to know Judge Kavanaugh as a fellow altar boy in elementary school. “We had a particular esprit de corps, a zest for life, as a group.”

They played basketball and board games. They also drank.

“It was part of the social life,” said Tobin Finizio, now a radiologist who was then the football team’s quarterback. “In the late ’70s and early ’80s, if you look at the statistics, underage drinking was fairly prevalent. We look at it now and say, ‘Oh my God, that was crazy.’”

Judge Kavanaugh — nicknamed “Bart” after a Georgetown Prep teacher garbled “Brett” — sometimes acted as a restraining influence. One night, a friend named Sean Feeley was out of control. Judge Kavanaugh pulled him aside and whispered three words: “Come on, Sean.” Mr. Feeley today credits Judge Kavanaugh with knowing how to calm classmates without them losing face.

Judge Kavanaugh and his friends had their own language and traditions. There was Mr. Garrett, nicknamed early on as “Squee” because of his resemblance to an upperclassman with a similar last name.

When he drank, Mr. Garrett would stutter words that began with the letter F. It became such a joke that many football teammates, including Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Garrett himself, had “FFFFF” references in their personal yearbook pages. Mr. Garrett, now a middle-school teacher in Georgia, sometimes hosted gatherings, including one when the Washington Redskins won the 1983 Super Bowl. Classmates said some seniors were too hung over to attend school the next day.

Another football player, Mr. Davis, was the heartthrob of the bunch, classmates said. They thought he looked like the singer Rick Springfield. Judge Kavanaugh, who didn’t have a car, often car-pooled to school with Mr. Davis, now the president of a Colorado water-distribution company.

Mr. Urgo — “Donny” — had been friends with Judge Kavanaugh since childhood, biking around the neighborhood and trading baseball cards. After high school, he and Judge Kavanaugh remained close, cramming for the Maryland bar exam and attending Washington Nationals games together. Mr. Urgo now helps run his family’s hotel business.

Judge Kavanaugh — a standout student, captain of the basketball team and a master of the quip, according to one teacher — was especially close to Mr. Judge, a fixture of the school’s party scene. Dr. Blasey said that Mr. Judge was in the room and jumped onto the bed during the alleged 1982 assault.

Mr. Judge was widely perceived as a goofball with a big mouth. “He was a clown,” said Richard Holtz, a classmate and friend of Mr. Judge’s and Judge Kavanaugh’s. Once, before a home football game, Mr. Judge and some classmates chugged beers and then dressed up in blue-and-white cheerleader skirts and pranced around the field, a moment that was captured in the school’s yearbook.

Timothy Don, who car-pooled to school with Mr. Judge, said he would sometimes stop at 7-Eleven on the way home to buy a beer. “He was one of these kids who you could wind up and set off like a top and watch him go spinning out,” Mr. Don said, recalling Mr. Judge’s nervous laugh and how he would spontaneously jump onto his friends’ shoulders.

... < yearbook stuff >

In a 2005 memoir, “God and Man at Georgetown Prep,” Mr. Judge said the school was “positively swimming in alcohol, and my class partied with gusto — often right under the noses of our teachers.”

Along with two classmates, he wrote an underground student newspaper, The Unknown Hoya, which documented the scene. They viewed the official student paper, The Little Hoya, as too stiff.

The stapled-together pamphlet also printed a running tally of the number of kegs consumed at various house parties as the seniors pursued their 100-keg ambition. Three football players who hosted parties accounted for 14 of the 38 kegs the class had finished at one point.

... < screenshots from the "underground" prep school newspaper >

The newspaper also jabbed at neighboring schools, including the all-girls Holton-Arms, where Dr. Blasey was a student. The newspaper claimed that a public library card was “all it takes to have a good time with any H.H. (Holton Hosebag),” using slang for a promiscuous woman.

In June 1983, Judge Kavanaugh’s crew embarked on its annual trip to Maryland’s coast for “Beach Week,” where the region’s high school students would swim, drink and party.

Judge Kavanaugh had arranged to rent a condo on the 14th floor of an Ocean City high-rise. The building had an outdoor swimming pool and beach access.

In the handwritten letter, Judge Kavanaugh told his friends that he would be on a family trip to Ireland when the lease started, so they would have to pick up the keys and settle the outstanding $398 bill. He reminded them to bring their own towels and bedding.

“One of you has to grab the bull by the horns and take charge,” he instructed.

“I think we are unanimous that any girls we can beg to stay there are welcomed with open....,” he wrote, his ellipsis at the end leaving certain things unsaid. He noted that the boys should kick out anyone who didn’t belong: “The danger of eviction is great and that would suck because of the money and because this week has big potential. (Interpret as wish.)”

Judge Kavanaugh signed the letter: “FFFFF, Bart.”

In an interview, Tom Kane, a classmate and regular “Beach Week” participant, dismissed the letter as “a couple of harmless jokes.” He added: “It sounds like the script of ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ really.” He said he couldn’t remember details of the partying.

 

[fraurosena]

The presidunce tried to shame her and made fun of her, but Lordy, her testimony was taped... 

 

Edited October 3, 2018 by fraurosena
riffle

[fraurosena]

The minority has written a letter to Grassley and it implicitely reveals that the Committee had information from the first Kavanaugh background check about sexual misconduct and alcohol abuse.

 

[fraurosena]

Holy Rufus!

 

[fraurosena]

Of course he refused. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because of course: "As FBI background check of Kavanaugh nears its end, probe appears to have been highly curtailed"

Spoiler

The FBI background check of Brett M. Kavanaugh appeared to remain curtailed in its scope Wednesday even as agents neared the end of their work, opening up the possibility that the bureau would again face criticism over what some will view as a lackluster investigation.

Though complete details of the FBI’s findings had yet to be released Wednesday evening, the bureau’s inquiry seems to have focused mostly on an allegation by a California professor who claims Kavanaugh assaulted her decades ago at a party in Maryland, when both were high school students.

The Washington Post has been able to confirm interviews with only six witnesses, five of whom have a connection to the professor or her allegation.

The investigation was always unlikely to answer definitively whether Kavanaugh was guilty of sexual misconduct decades ago. But the probe’s limited scope — which was dictated by the White House, along with a Friday deadline — is likely to exacerbate the partisan tensions surrounding Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Even before the probe had ended, several people who claimed to have information that could be useful said they ended up mired in bureaucracy when they tried to get in touch with the FBI. Democrats also cried foul over what they saw as inappropriate parameters that the White House seemed to be imposing on the bureau.

The White House and the FBI have treated each other warily throughout the process, people familiar with the matter said. Both sides were mindful that their written communications might one day be subject to subpoena, particularly if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives in next month’s midterm elections, the people said.

President Trump has insisted publicly he was not curtailing the FBI probe. But privately, the White House restricted the FBI from delving deeply into Kavanaugh’s youthful drinking and exploring whether he had lied to Congress about his alcohol use, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Some of those involved in the case complained that the bureau did not follow leads that were offered to it.

The FBI, for example, interviewed Deborah Ramirez, who accused Kavanaugh of exposing his penis to her at a gathering when both were college students at Yale, and Ramirez’s team provided agents with more than 20 people who might have information relevant to her claims. But as of Wednesday, Ramirez’s team had no indication that the bureau had interviewed any of them.

The FBI also did not interview Christine Blasey Ford, her legal team said. Ford is the California professor whose public testimony about a high school gathering at which she said Kavanaugh forced her onto a bed and groped her helped spark the background check in the first place. The legal team said Ford was willing to turn over to the bureau notes from therapy sessions in which she described the assault.

Instead, the bureau interviewed three people who Ford said attended the party: Mark Judge, Patrick Smyth and Leland Keyser. The FBI also talked to two other friends of Kavanaugh’s who were listed as attending a gathering during the same summer that Ford alleged she was assaulted: Chris Garrett, who went out with Ford for a time, and Tim Gaudette.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said that agents also had apparently not talked to Kavanaugh himself.

“The White House confirmation that it will not allow the FBI to interview Dr. Blasey Ford, Judge Kavanaugh or witnesses identified by Deborah Ramirez raises serious concerns that this is not a credible investigation,” she said in a statement.

The FBI similarly had not — at least as of Wednesday — interviewed Julie Swetnick, who said in a declaration that Kavanaugh was physically abusive toward girls in high school and was present at a house party in 1982 where she says she was the victim of a “gang” rape. But the bureau did ask Judge, who was named in the affidavit, about her claims.

It is not abnormal in background checks for the White House to tell the bureau what to do. Background checks, unlike criminal investigations, are done for the benefit of the White House so that officials might have more information on people they want to nominate for critical government jobs.

The background check for Kavanaugh, though, was anything but ordinary. Witness interviews were disclosed in near real time, along with complaints that the bureau was not doing enough. The high-profile nature of the matter spurred many who felt they had information to offer the FBI to reach out proactively.

Richard Oh, an emergency room physician who lived in Kavanaugh’s first-year residence hall, said he contacted the FBI office in Denver to describe overhearing someone tearfully telling another student about an incident when Kavanaugh was a student at Yale. The incident, which Oh described to the New Yorker, involved a fake penis and a male student exposing himself.

Oh said he was put on hold and waited so long that he eventually submitted information through the FBI website.

“So far I haven’t heard back,” Oh said late Tuesday. He confirmed Wednesday night that was still the case.

Lawyer Alan M. Abramson said he represented a friend of Ramirez’s who was hoping to share an account of a conversation the two had in the early 1990s about an incident in her freshman year. The friend, Abramson said, was among those whose names Ramirez’s lawyer had passed to the FBI.

Abramson said that when the friend, whom he declined to identify, did not hear from the bureau, he called a supervisor, who referred him to a field office, which said it would pass his information on. “I have not heard from them yet, but I am hopeful that they will still contact me,” Abramson said in an email to The Post.

Kerry Berchem, who attended Yale a year after Kavanaugh, said she contacted the FBI about text messages she received from a close friend of Kavanaugh’s — messages that she believes suggest Kavanaugh or his friends might have been trying to preemptively rebut negative stories that could surface during his confirmation process. Berchem said agents could determine nothing untoward happened but expressed frustration at not being interviewed.

“I’m simply trying to have relevant investigators ask the right questions,” Berchem said in an interview with The Washington Post. “If there was an anticipatory narrative to discredit or conceal the Ramirez allegations in July or September, then the Senate should know about it and take that into account.”

 

[nvmbr02]

A little off topic but I thought this article was worth the read. I think most of us here on Free Jinger know how harmful the "purity culture" of Evangelicalism is but this article explains it well.

I Know Why Evangelical Women Support Brett Kavanaugh. I Was Raised To Do The Same.

Spoiler

I Know Why Evangelical Women Support Brett Kavanaugh. I Was Raised To Do The Same.

Carly Gelsinger

Guest Writer

It seems a lot of people can’t fathom why a woman, regardless of political beliefs, would support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in light of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about him sexually assaulting her.

I can, and here’s why.

There exists a generation of women who were never taught consent ― and I’m not talking about Boomers. I’m talking about the hundreds of thousands of us who were raised in church and came of age at the turn of the millennium.

In our world, we were taught that our bodies didn’t belong to ourselves. God owned them, they said, but really, that meant that men owned them. Our fathers. Our pastors. Our husbands. Our politicians. Never ourselves.

Carly Gelsinger at age 17 at a church retreat. Girls in purity culture were taught to walk a fine line between looking pretty but not too pretty.

This is, of course, the foundation of the 1990s evangelical movement known as “purity culture.” A pendulum swing from the free love culture of the 1970s and the AIDS scare of the 1980s, the 1990s were all about abstinence. Evangelicals took it upon themselves to stop a generation from promiscuity. They forged a mascot, a slogan (“True Love Waits”), held “purity balls,” manufactured an endless supply of merchandise — and voila! Purity culture, a subculture within an already-bizarre evangelical subculture, was born.

Purity culture taught young girls to bear responsibility for men’s lust. When we got dressed in the morning, we were supposed to ask ourselves what our grandfathers would think of our outfits. We wore T-shirts that said, “Modest is Hottest.”

Our formative years were spent in shame over our bodies, in suspicion of our sexuality, and in earnest ownership over the behavior of men.

When I was 13, I went to my female youth pastor, shaken by the first aggressive catcall directed my way. She said, “Welcome to the wonderful world of womanhood,” with an edge of tired sarcasm to her voice. That was it. I shrugged it off and tried to shrug off the hundreds of catcalls in my future.

When I was 14, I was lying on my belly reading the Bible on the church floor before youth group. A youth leader told me to sit up. If a girl is horizontal around boys, it forces them to picture you naked, she said. It causes them to stumble.

We were taught that women who have sex before marriage are like a trampled rose. Damaged goods. Undesirable. Unworthy of love. Sometimes the metaphor used in sermon illustrations was a chewed piece of gum. The pastor would chew a piece of gum and then pass it around the room, asking if anyone else wanted to chew it after him.

When I was 15, I was violently assaulted on a mission trip. In response, my team leader literally asked me, “What were you wearing?”

This famous phrase is not just an internet meme. People actually say it to women, and even more destructively, to young girls. They said it to me. I shut up about that assault for a good decade after that. 

When I was 16, I sat in a dark movie theater with my crush, alarmed by my desire to hold his hand. It was my first official date, and I was too consumed with fear to enjoy it. You see, we were taught that women who have sex before marriage are like a trampled rose. Damaged goods. Undesirable. Unworthy of love.

Sometimes the metaphor used in sermon illustrations was a chewed piece of gum. The pastor would chew a piece of gum and then pass it around the room, asking if anyone else wanted to chew it after him. Sometimes it was a piece of tape that had lost its stickiness. Sometimes it was a torn-up piece of construction paper. The sermon illustrations differed, but the message was always the same. With these images seared into my mind, I cut off contact with my crush after that night.

When I was 17, I attended a purity retreat where I signed a pledge to “save myself” for my future husband. I didn’t even think about what I wanted, because that didn’t matter. My body wasn’t my own.

When I was 18, in college, a guy at my Christian school lectured my friend and me for stretching in the student union. He said it caused him to picture us in the positions we could maintain in bed and that we should work harder to protect his thoughts.

We acquiesced. After all, we wanted to be women of God, worthy of our future husbands.

The fundamentalist church in Northern California that Gelsinger attended as a teenager. 

When I was 19, another girlfriend of mine went to visit a guy who was housesitting off campus. She kissed him on the sofa after a movie, and then gathered her keys to leave. He forced himself on her. She came back to the dorms in tears. She didn’t report it because we knew that girls who had sex were expelled from school.

There was so much shame regarding sex in evangelical circles that none of it — consensual or otherwise — was talked about. There was no difference. It was all sin. 

When I was 20, my Christian boyfriend dumped me. “I want a pure woman,” he told me after one of our kissing sessions. We hadn’t even had sex. “Maybe if your cleavage wasn’t always out I could have controlled myself,” he suggested. I promised him we could stop making out. That wasn’t enough. We already had. I was damaged goods.

When I was 21, I was engaged to another Christian man. We stuck to the pledges we had made as teenagers. We sought Christian counsel to prepare ourselves for marriage. Always be available to your husband, they said. If you don’t fulfill his needs, he will lust after other women. Until then, continue to be sexless. Try not to even think about it. An impure mind is the start of all sins.

By then, I was damn well ready to have sex, yet I did not until after the cake was cut. I had made a promise to other people. My body was not my own.

I’ve had to unlearn so many ideas about sex and the female body. I had to relearn basic concepts of bodily autonomy, sexual consent, and sex/body positivity. Purity culture uses fear to try to stop women from being autonomous over their bodies. At its core, it is about control.

When I was 22, I began to untangle myself from the mess of purity culture. I’ve had to unlearn so many ideas about sex and the female body. I had to relearn basic concepts of bodily autonomy, sexual consent, and sex/body positivity. Purity culture uses fear to try to stop women from being autonomous over their bodies. At its core, it is about control. 

So this is why it is not surprising to me that so many women are rushing to protect Kavanaugh and deriding Ford. The women who grew up being guardians of male sexuality are now approaching middle age, and many of us are still assuming that role and expecting other women to as well.

The lingering effects of purity culture run deep. We were taught to distrust women — beginning with ourselves.

 

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

 

Pfffft, what do law professors know about anything? Liberal hacks, all of them!

 

[Cartmann99]

13 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Fucking douche cannons in the Senste just did this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-on-senate-panel-release-explicit-statement-about-kavanaugh-accusers-sex-life/2018/10/02/714d8abc-c685-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html

I fucking hate these people.

And attention Apple for the last goddamn time I did not mean ducking.

Apple's just afraid you'll owe so much to the swear jar people that you won't have enough left over to buy their products.

[hoipolloi]

Ronan Farrow & Jane Mayer of The New Yorker have an update from those who tried to speak to the FBI but were not interviewed or couldn't get a response to their requests: 

Quote

Kenneth G. Appold was a suitemate of Kavanaugh’s at the time of the alleged incident. He had previously spoken to The New Yorker about Ramirez on condition of anonymity, but he said that he is now willing to be identified because he believes that the F.B.I. must thoroughly investigate her allegation. Appold, who is the James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History at Princeton Theological Seminary, said that he first heard about the alleged incident involving Kavanaugh and Ramirez either the night it occurred or a day or two later....Appold, who won two Fulbright Fellowships, and earned his Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale in 1994, also recalled telling his graduate-school roommate about the incident in 1989 or 1990. That roommate, Michael Wetstone, who is now an architect, confirmed Appold’s account and said, “it stood out in our minds because it was a shocking story of transgression.” 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[fraurosena]

Lies, lies, lies, coverup, lies, anger, partisanship, lies, conspiracy theories, lies, lies, sham investigation, more lies, confirmation. 

 

[Howl]

18 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Someone must have quite the компрометирующий материал on Lindsey Beauregard Graham give how much Graham is falling over himself to praise fuck face and Kavadouche.

 

I don't think it's much of a secret that Lindsey Graham is widely thought to be a closeted gay man, or maybe he's a celibate gay man, but gay.  Or celibate.  Or he's quietly gay and his staff likes him enough to keep secrets.  Or maybe he is gay in DC, but keeps everything zipped up when he's at home in South Carolina.  Whatever. However, if he is closeted and subsequently outed, his lifetime political career as a South Carolina Republican is over, so yes, blackmail is a distinct possibility. 

Of course, it's different for straight men in South Carolina, of course it is. 

Exhibit 1:  Mark Sanford, Appalachian Trail, Maria Belen Chapur, political comeback. 

 

[AuntK]

6 minutes ago, Howl said:

I don't think it's much of a secret that Lindsey Graham is widely thought to be a closeted gay man, or maybe he's a celibate gay man, but gay.  Or celibate.  Or he's quietly gay and his staff likes him enough to keep secrets.  Or maybe he is gay in DC, but keeps everything zipped up when he's at home in South Carolina.  Whatever. However, if he is closeted and subsequently outed, his lifetime political career as a South Carolina Republican is over, so yes, blackmail is a distinct possibility. 

Of course, it's different for straight men in South Carolina, of course it is. 

Exhibit 1:  Mark Sanford, Appalachian Trail, Maria Belen Chapur, political comeback. 

 

Yes, that was the "secret" I was referring to in an earlier post.  I've read that South Carolinians have overlooked Lindsey's homosexuality because he continues to toe the Republican line, anti-LGBT rights, anti-choice, anti-minority, etc.  But there was an editorial cartoon a couple of days ago, showing Lindsey in an antebellum dress! I'll try to find it.

[fraurosena]

Will it stop him from confirming Kavanaugh though?

Sasse: I encouraged Trump to pick someone other than Kavanaugh

Quote

GOP Sen. Ben Sasse (Neb.) said Wednesday night that he urged President Trump to nominate someone other than Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court earlier this year.

"Although I've said many complimentary things about Judge Brett Kavanaugh and his distinguished record … I will say that I urged the president back in June and early July to make a different choice before he announced this nomination," Sasse said during an emotional speech from the Senate floor centering on sexual assault.

Sasse did not say whom he urged Trump to nominate, but that he "urged the president to nominate a woman." Circuit judges Joan Larsen and Amy Coney Barrett were considered to be on the White House's shortlist for the Supreme Court vacancy left by Anthony Kennedy's retirement.

Sasse said he had concerns about the Senate's ability to handle any potential sexual harassment or sexual assault allegations prior to learning of Kavanaugh's nomination.

"Part of my argument then was that the very important 'Me Too' movement was also very new and that this Senate is not at all well prepared to handle potential allegations of sexual harassment and assault," he said.

Kavanaugh is facing several allegations of sexual misconduct dating back to his days in high school and college. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Sasse added that he believes most sexual assault allegations are true, but warned that "in this city … that situation might have well been different, I argued in June."

"In the interest of cautious prudence I urged a different path than the one that was chosen," he said.

Sasse is the latest GOP senator who is known to have urged the White House to select someone other than Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh came under fire from social conservatives before officially being tapped by Trump.

GOP Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Tom Cotton (Ark.) were a bloc of conservatives who privately expressed concerns to the White House about nominating Kavanaugh, a person familiar with the discussions told The Hill at the time.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[thoughtful]

52 minutes ago, AuntK said:

But there was an editorial cartoon a couple of days ago, showing Lindsey in an antebellum dress! I'll try to find it.

@GreyhoundFanposted it in the political cartoons thread:

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

Edited October 4, 2018 by AmazonGrace

[AmazonGrace]