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lk2fireone (0)
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| 09-30-18 09:36am - 2292 days | #1207 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User  Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says Brett Kavanaugh is unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. Also says that if he lied, he is unfit to be a judge. My personal take: it seems apparent to me that Kavanaugh has lied. I do not see why he is not facing perjury charges. He has distorted the truth in his testimony, said untrue things, under oath. The Democrats are a weak party. At least the Republicans, who are complete hypocrites, have the strength and will to attack their opponents, with lies and slander and whatever they can do to advance their agenda. If the Democrats can't put Kavanaugh in jail for perjury, or make a very good attempt, they are fucking idiots who deserve to be treated with contempt for their stupidity and weakness. ------- ------- Politics Christine Blasey Ford Would Have Been Called ‘Hysterical’ If She Acted Like Kavanaugh: Pelosi HuffPost Sebastian Murdock,HuffPost 19 hours ago House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that if Christine Blasey Ford had behaved like Brett Kavanaugh did when he testified about her sexual assault allegation against him, she’d be labeled “hysterical.” Speaking at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin on Saturday, Pelosi said Kavanaugh is unfit to be on the Supreme Court. “I couldn’t help but think that if a woman had ever performed that way, they would say ‘hysterical,’” Pelosi said about Thursday’s emotional testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. During the hearing, Blasey recounted the night she says Kavanaugh pinned her on a bed, covered her mouth with his hand, and attempted to forcibly remove her clothing at a gathering in high school. In his own testimony, Kavanaugh forcefully declared his innocence, at times yelling, crying and interrupting senators. The judge called the allegations a “gross character assassination” conceived by Democratic lawmakers and fueled by “revenge on behalf of” Bill and Hillary Clinton. “I think that he disqualifies himself with those statements and the manner in which he went after the Clintons and the Democrats,” Pelosi told interviewer Alex Wagner. She added that “if he is not telling the truth to Congress or to the FBI, then he’s not fit not only to be on the Supreme Court, but to be on the court he’s on right now.” An FBI investigation into the allegations was opened Friday. Kavanaugh has also been credibly accused of sexual misconduct by two other women. “It’s not time, shall we say, for a hysterical, biased person to go to the court and expect us to say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful,’” Pelosi said. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 09-29-18 11:22pm - 2292 days | #1206 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
President Trump says the FBI will have free rein to do whatever they have to do. Brett Kavanaugh is a great man. The FBI will do a thorough investigation. Even if it takes one whole hour, and the scope is limited, because the White House and Senate are in charge of limiting the scope of what the FBI can investigate, Brett Kavanaugh will be shown to be the bestest, greatest man for the Supreme Court. Let me say this: we share a deep concern that the Democratic party is a bunch of corrupt criminals that are trying to destroy our great country, and we can not allow these mean, nasty scum-bags to destroy the reputation of Brett Kavanaugh. The FBI probe is a blessing in disguise. Let's put these Democrats in jail, where they belong. Lock them up. This includes Feinsteen, Rosensteen, and Muellersteen, those pawns of Satan, the great destroyer. Let us pray the nation will survive. Hallelujah and Amen. ----------- ----------- Trump asks if Feinstein leaked allegation against Kavanaugh, says FBI probe may be 'blessing in disguise' NBC News Lauren Egan Sep 29th 2018 8:15PM President Donald Trump on Saturday fully backed his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, said the FBI investigation of him may be a blessing in disguise and questioned whether Sen. Dianne Feinstein might have leaked the allegation from Christine Blasey Ford. The president spoke for the first time about his embattled nominee since ordering the additional FBI background check amid sexual misconduct allegations against the judge. Trump made the comments to reporters as he was departing for a reelection campaign rally in West Virginia later Saturday night. At the raucous Saturday night rally, Trump brought up Feinstein's name as a possible source of the leak and the crowd booed. The president went on to mock her response at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday when she was asked if she or her staff leaked Ford's allegation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh. See Also: White House limits scope of the FBI's Kavanaugh investigation Trump trashed Democrats and the media at the campaign event, saying the Kavanaugh hearing at which both the nominee and Ford testified showed that the Democrats were full of "anger" and "mean," "nasty" and "untruthful." The president said they were on a "mission to resist, obstruct and destroy. You've seen that over the last four days." "They don't care who they hurt, who they have to run over in order to get power and control," he continued. "That's what they want — power and control — w'’re not going to give it to them." He called the Democratic Party the "party of crime." The president also launched into a scathing attack against the press, calling it the "enemy of the people," as he has before and drawing cheers from the crowd of supporters. Earlier, Trump was asked by reporters about Kavanaugh when he was on his way to West Virginia. "I think it's going very well," Trump said. "The FBI as you know is all over talking to everybody...he's a very high-quality person. I would expect it's going to turn out very well for the judge, there's never been anybody that's been looked at like Judge Kavanaugh." Trump added that "having the FBI go out and do a thorough investigation, whether it's three days or seven days, I think it's going to be less than a week, but having them do a thorough investigation, I actually think will be a blessing in disguise, it'll be a good thing." | |
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| 09-29-18 06:20pm - 2292 days | #1205 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST: In 1997, Judge published a memoir about alcoholism during his teenage years, titled "Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk," in which he recounts booze-soaked parties with his prep school friends and alcohol-fueled attempts to hook up with girls. He also recalls working "at the local supermarket" in the summer of 1982. PHOTO: Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, right, and Mark Judge, left, are pictured in an image from the Georgetown Preparatory high school yearbook. (Georgetown Preparatory School) Judge has authored several other books and is now a Washington-based conservative writer whose byline has appeared in publications such as The Daily Caller and The American Spectator. In a recent letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee leadership, Judge revealed he is a "recovering alcoholic and a cancer survivor" who has "struggled with depression and anxiety," and thus avoids public speaking. Another accuser names Mark Judge Since Ford's allegations became public, at least two other women have come forward accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct and one of them also named Judge. Michael Avenatti, an attorney who is known for representing adult film star Stormy Daniels, posted to Twitter Wednesday a photo of his newest client, Julie Swetnick of Washington, D.C., along with court documents detailing new allegations about the behavior of Kavanaugh and Judge during their high school years. In a sworn declaration provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Swetnick alleges she "became aware of efforts" by Kavanaugh and Judge and others to spike girls' drinks at house parties. Swetnick's declaration also includes an allegation that she was raped by multiple boys at a party in 1982 while she was incapacitated without her consent. She does not identify her alleged assailants or the location of the alleged incident but claims that Kavanaugh and Judge were "present." Judge's attorney, Van Gelder, told ABC News in a statement Wednesday that her client "vehemently denies" the claims. In a letter emailed to committee leadership Friday afternoon, Judge wrote that he doesn't know Swetnick and her allegations "are so bizarre that, even while suffering from my addiction, I would remember actions so outlandish." During her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, a visibly distraught Ford recounted how the alleged assault occurred. She said she was attending a "small gathering" at a house in the Bethesda area one summer night in 1982. She claimed Kavanaugh and Judge were among the party-goers. Ford said people at the party were drinking beer and she had one. She later went upstairs to use the restroom and was shoved from behind into a bedroom across from the bathroom, she said. She couldn't see who pushed her, she said, but Kavanaugh and Judge allegedly entered the room and locked the door behind them. Ford said someone pushed her onto the bed and Kavanaugh allegedly got on top of her, "groped" her and tried to remove her clothes, while Judge allegedly alternated between egging him on and telling him to stop. "I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hands over my mouth to stop me from yelling," she said. "Both Brett and Mark were drunkenly laughing during the attack. They seemed to be having a very good time. Mark seemed ambivalent, at times urging Brett on, at times telling him to stop. A couple of times, I made eye contact with Mark and thought he might try to help me. But he did not." Seared into her memory is "the uproarious laughter between the two and their having fun at my expense," Ford told senators. During the alleged assault, Ford said Judge jumped up on the bed twice while Kavanaugh was on top of her, causing them to topple over the second time and allowing Ford to get away. She ran out of the room, down the stairs and out of the house, she said. PHOTO: Christine Blasey Ford, with lawyer Debra S. Katz, left, answers questions at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, Sept. 27, 2018 on Capitol Hill. (Melina Mara-Pool/Getty Images) Ford said she has not knowingly seen Kavanaugh since that night, but she claimed she saw Judge about six to eight weeks later at a Safeway in the Potomac, Maryland. Judge seemed to be employed at the supermarket chain when they ran into each other and she said "hello" to him, according to Ford. Judge's face turned "white" and he seemed "very uncomfortable in saying hello back," she said. "We had previously been friendly at the times we saw each other over the previous two years," Ford told senators. "I wouldn't characterize him as not friendly. He was just nervous and not really wanting to speak with me. He looked a bit ill." 'Bart O'Kavanaugh' A visibly emotional and irate Kavanaugh also testified under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, during which he denied all allegations against him. Kavanaugh told senators he "never did anything remotely resembling what Dr. Ford describes" and has never been in a room alone with Ford and Judge. PHOTO: Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh is sworn in before testifying during the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sept. 27, 2018 on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Tom Williams/Pool Image via AP) Senators grilled Kavanaugh about his behavior during high school and questioned him about the veracity of Judge's book, "Wasted," in which Judge references a "Bart O'Kavanaugh" who "puked in someone's car" and "passed out on his way back from a party." When asked whether that character was a pseudonym for him, Kavanaugh told senators they would "have to ask" Judge. "Mark Judge was a friend of ours in high school who developed a very serious drinking problem and addiction problem that lasted decades and was very difficult for him to escape from and ... then he had leukemia as well on top of it," Kavanaugh said. "As part of his therapy or part of his coming to grips with sobriety, he wrote a book. That is a fictionalized book and an account." 'How'd you find me?' After listening to hours of impassioned testimonies from both Ford and Kavanaugh, Democratic senators continued their calls for an FBI investigation into the accusations and for key witnesses, like Judge, to be interviewed. That evening, Judge emailed a letter to the committee leadership asserting his and Kavanaugh's innocence. "I do not want to comment about these events publicly. As a recovering alcoholic and a cancer survivor, I have struggled with depression and anxiety. As a result, I avoid public speaking," Judge wrote, in part. "Brett Kavanaugh and I were friends in high school, but we have not spoken directly in several years. I do not recall the events described by Dr. Ford in her testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee today. I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes." His attorney, Van Gelder, also issued a statement on behalf of her client: "Mr. Judge does not recall the events described by Dr. Ford in her testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee today. We have told the Committee that Mr. Judge does not want to comment about these events publicly. We also have said that he is willing to answer written questions, and he has. In addition, he is willing to participate in a confidential, fact-finding investigation. He will not respond to any media inquiries." Van Gelder told ABC News in an email Saturday that she nor her client are commenting during the proceedings. Judge's whereabouts were unknown for several days as his name appeared in news articles and on TV. But a reporter with The Washington Post spotted him on Monday in Bethany Beach, Delaware, where he apparently has been laying low at a friend's beachfront house. Judge wouldn't talk to the reporter beyond asking, "How'd you find me?" Mark Judge says he will 'cooperate' with probe 'confidentially' The Senate Judiciary Committee reconvened on Capitol Hill on Friday to vote on advancing Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate floor. The Republican-led committee defeated a motion from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) to subpoena Judge. "I'd like to make a motion to subpoena Mark Judge as a witness before our committee," Blumenthal said. "Evidently, he has never been interviewed by the FBI, he has never been questioned by any member of our committee, he has never submitted a detailed account of what he knows." Blumenthal also asked the committee chairman for more time to make a final appeal to halt the confirmation process, which Grassley granted. PHOTO: Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley holds up a letter from Mark Judge, longtime friend of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Sept. 28, 2018. (Jim Bourg/Reuters) The meeting resumed later that afternoon and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) suggested delaying the Senate floor vote "for up to and not more than one week" to allow the FBI to conduct an investigation into any allegations against Kavanaugh. The committee subsequently voted 11-10, along party lines, to send the nomination to the floor. Judge emailed a letter to the committee leadership, saying he will "with any law enforcement agency that is assigned to confidentially investigate these allegations." Just as daylight began to wane from the skyline of the nation's capital, Trump announced he has ordered an FBI supplemental probe of Kavanaugh. "I’ve ordered the FBI to conduct a supplemental investigation to update Judge Kavanaugh’s file," the president said in a statement Friday evening. "As the Senate has requested, this update must be limited in scope and completed in less than one week." | |
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| 09-29-18 06:19pm - 2292 days | #1204 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Good Morning America Who is Mark Judge? Brett Kavanaugh's high school friend and the only named witness Good Morning America MORGAN WINSOR,Good Morning America 8 hours ago Who is Mark Judge? Brett Kavanaugh's high school friend and the only named witness originally appeared on abcnews.go.com Brett Kavanaugh's high school classmate Mark Judge has become a pivotal yet enigmatic figure in the contentious confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominee. Christine Blasey Ford, who testified under oath before the committee on Capitol Hill Thursday, alleges that Judge witnessed Kavanaugh sexually assault her at a party in suburban Maryland when they were teens in the early 1980s. She told senators Thursday that the "uproarious laughter between the two," referring to Judge and Kavanaugh, was among the most painful memories of the alleged attack. Kavanaugh and Judge have repeatedly denied the claims. Judge, who said he and Kavanaugh were "friends in high school," said in a statement he "never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes." In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee leadership on Friday, Judge said he will cooperate with any confidential law enforcement investigation into the accusations. The only named witness Ford, a 51-year-old psychology professor at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at Stanford University in California, broke her silence after 36 years, telling senators she didn't speak of the alleged incident in detail to anyone until 2012 when she was in a couples therapy session with her husband. She said she originally wanted to remain anonymous when she contacted her congressional representative in July, after learning that Kavanaugh was on President Donald Trump's shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees. But once her accusations became public, Ford said she believed it was her "civic duty" to share her story. After calling the office of her congresswoman, Ford said she also messaged The Washington Post's confidential tip line and identified Kavanaugh as her alleged assailant and Judge as a witness. Ford later agreed to speak publicly to a journalist at the newspaper and Judge was named in a Sept. 16 article about the alleged incident. The Washington Post reported at the time that Judge declined to comment. PHOTO: Christine Blasey Ford's handwritten account of her allegations against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Cavanaugh dated Aug. 7, 2018, was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee staff with her polygraph report. (Senate Judiciary Committee) Two days prior to that article, before Ford's name was known, Judge gave an interview to The Weekly Standard in which he called the accusations "just absolutely nuts." He said The New Yorker had contacted him for comment on the allegations and that's when he first learned he was named in the woman's letter to lawmakers about Kavanaugh. Judge's attorney, Barbara "Biz" Van Gelder, subsequently emailed a letter dated Sept. 18 to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein, the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, respectively. The letter contained a statement from Judge, saying he has "no memory of this alleged incident" that Ford describes. "Brett Kavanaugh and I were friends in high school but I do not recall the party described in Dr. Ford's letter. More to the point, I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes," Judge's statement reads, in part. "I have no more information to offer the Committee and I do not wish to speak publicly regarding the incidents described in Dr. Ford's letter." 'Wasted' high school years Judge and Kavanaugh both attended Georgetown Preparatory School, an elite, all-boys Catholic high school in North Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. | |
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| 09-29-18 05:55pm - 2292 days | #1203 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
A more complete account of how Christine Ford's friend is not refuting Ford's accusation: ----- ----- Christine Blasey Ford's friend is not refuting Ford's allegation, will cooperate with FBI, lawyer 'Ms. Keyser does not refute Dr. Ford's account' By ARIANE DE VOGUE, CNN SUPREME COURT REPORTER Posted: 8:32 AM, September 29, 2018 (CNN) - Leland Ingham Keyser, a friend of the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were at a party in high school, does not refute the veracity of the allegation, although she does not remember the alleged incident, her lawyer said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, claims that during a party in the early 1980s at which Keyser and several others were present, Kavanaugh drunkenly pushed her into a bedroom, pinned her down and attempted to remove her clothes before she was able to escape. Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the allegation. "Ms. Keyser does not refute Dr. Ford's account, and she has already told the press that she believes Dr. Ford's account," Keyser's attorney, Howard Walsh, wrote in the letter, which was sent to the committee overnight Friday. "However, the simple and unchangeable truth is that she is unable to corroborate it because she has no recollection of the incident in question." Walsh also said in the letter that Keyser will "cooperate fully" with an FBI investigation into the allegation. The letter comes after emotional testimony from Ford and Kavanaugh about the allegation at a committee hearing Thursday. Keyser felt the need for the letter, Walsh wrote, to clarify a previous statement about the allegation, which came up at the hearing and which she believed made it sound as if she did not believe the party had occurred. The previous statement, which Walsh released to CNN and the committee last week, said, "Simply put, Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford." In her testimony Ford said she remembered that Keyser, a longtime friend, was present at the party, but that it is not surprising Keyser would not recall the party because Ford did not tell her about the alleged assault at the time. "Oh no, she didn't know about the event," Ford told the committee, "She was downstairs during the event and I did not share it with her." Kavanaugh mentioned Keyser's statement several times during his testimony to stress that no one who Ford alleges attended the party has come forward to say they remembered being there. In addition, two others have issued statements saying they don't remember the party in question. "I have no memory of this alleged incident," said Mark Judge, Kavanaugh's friend, who Ford alleged was in the bedroom during the assault. In a letter he sent to the Judiciary Committee last week, Judge also said he did not recall the party and never saw Kavanaugh act in the matter Ford describes. Another person Ford claims was at the party, Patrick J. Smyth, has issued a statement in a letter from his lawyer to the committee saying he had no knowledge of the party or the allegation. "I understand that I have been identified by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as the person she remembers as 'PJ' who supposedly was present at the party she described in her statements to the Washington Post," Smyth said in the statement. "I am issuing this statement today to make it clear to all involved that I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh." "Personally speaking, I have known Brett Kavanaugh since high school and I know him to be a person of great integrity, a great friend, and I have never witnessed any improper conduct by Brett Kavanaugh towards women," the statement continued. "To safeguard my own privacy and anonymity, I respectfully request that the Committee accept this statement in response to any inquiry the Committee may have." On Friday, the White House agreed to ask the FBI to investigate "current credible allegations" as a part of Kavanaugh's background check. Lawyers for Judge and Smyth said they would cooperate. Additional allegation Besides Ford's allegation, the FBI is looking at the accusation of another woman, Deborah Ramirez, who has alleged Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at dormitory party while the two were undergraduate students at Yale. The FBI has reached out to Ramirez, her attorney said, confirming a report in The Washington Post. "We can confirm the FBI has reached out to interview Ms. Ramirez and she has agreed to cooperate with their investigation," the attorney, John Clune, said in a statement. "Out of respect for the integrity of the process, we will have no further comment at this time." Kavanaugh and the White House have denied Ramirez's allegation, which was reported by The New Yorker. "This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen, Kavanaugh said in a statement last Sunday when The New Yorker published the article. "The people who knew me then know this did not happen and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple." CNN has not independently confirmed Ramirez's allegations. Ramirez's lawyers wrote a letter to the leaders of the Judiciary Committee this week saying Ramirez, who lives in Colorado, was willing to cooperate with them regarding her allegation as well as a separate letter to the FBI's field office in Denver requesting that her allegation be included in the agency's background investigation for Kavanaugh's nomination. | |
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| 09-29-18 05:11pm - 2293 days | #1202 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
From Brett Kavanaugh's testimony under oath on Thursday, September 27, 2018 "Importantly her friend, Ms. Keyser, has not only denied knowledge of the party, Ms. Keyser said under penalty of felony she does not know me, does not recall ever being at a party with me ever. And my two male friends who were allegedly there, who knew me well, have told this committee under penalty of felony that they do not recall any such party and that I never did or would do anything like this. Dr. Ford’s allegation is not merely uncorroborated, it is refuted by the very people she says were there, including by a long-time friend of hers. Refuted." That is a lie. That is perjury. Ms. Keyser did not refute Dr. Ford's allegation of attempted rape. Leland Ingham Keyser, a friend of the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were at a party in high school, does not refute the veracity of the allegation, although she does not remember the alleged incident, her lawyer said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. When Brett Kavanaugh, a federal judge, twists the facts, that is lying. That is perjury. I don't know why the Democrats are not charging Brett Kavanaugh with perjury, for this statement and for other statements under oath, which can easily be shown as false. | |
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| 09-29-18 04:49pm - 2293 days | #1201 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Christine Ford took a lie detector test recently, to support her claim that Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her. But Kavanaugh does not believe that lie detector tests are reliable. That is his current opinion, as stated to the Senate committee. Even though he wrote a judicial opinion 2 years ago that lie detector tests were a useful tool of law enforcement. | |
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| 09-29-18 04:45pm - 2293 days | #1200 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Brett Kavanaugh believes that lie detector tests are useful. He wrote an opinion on that matter 2 years ago, as a federal judge, writing they are "an important law enforcement tool." However, when asked if he took a lie detector test recently, after being accused of sexual misconduct, Kavanaugh explained that lie detector tests are "not reliable." What caused his position to flip-flop? Are lie detector tests great when used on criminals or potential criminals? But since Kavanaugh is not a criminal, they are not so good when used on him? ---------- ---------- Kavanaugh had different tune on lie detectors in the past Associated Press MICHAEL BALSAMO,Associated Press Fri, Sep 28 10:35 AM PDT WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh played down the importance and reliability of lie detector tests during his confirmation hearing. But he had a different tune just two years ago. As Kavanaugh's testimony was winding down Thursday, Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, asked Kavanaugh whether he had taken a polygraph examination after being accused of sexual misconduct. Kavanaugh said he'd be willing to do whatever the Judiciary Committee wanted, but added that polygraphs can't be used in federal court because "they're not reliable." But the judge wrote in 2016 that polygraph tests were an "important law enforcement tool." Kavanaugh wrote the unanimous opinion for the three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., finding that the Defense Department could withhold reports about whether lie detector tests were effective under the federal public records law. "The Government has satisfactorily explained how polygraph examinations serve law enforcement purposes," Kavanaugh wrote. Lie detectors tests are generally not accepted as direct evidence in criminal trials, but their use varies by state. Some ban them outright, others allow them if all parties consent, and some allow them as supporting, rather than direct, evidence. "As a judge on the D.C. circuit, Judge Kavanagh ruled they are in fact meaningful," Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Friday. "By refusing to take a polygraph, Judge Kavanaugh has failed that test." Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual misconduct by three women, putting his nomination for the high court at risk. He and one of the accusers, Christine Blasey Ford, who says Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when both were teenagers, testified publicly before the Judiciary Committee on Thursday. He vehemently denied the allegations. Ford attorneys sent the Judiciary Committee a report on an Aug. 8 lie detector test she took that states her account of what happened was "not indicative of deception." ___ Associated Press writer Colleen Long contributed to this report. | |
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| 09-29-18 10:54am - 2293 days | #1199 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
In Plain Terms, Judge Brett Kavanaugh Lies About Everything [Esquire] Charles P. Pierce ,Esquire•September 28, 2018 Early Friday morning, the AP reported that, the day before, Judge Brett Kavanaugh "misstated" the drinking age in Maryland when he recalled his days of downing brewskis with P.J. and Squi. From Time: The legal age in that state was raised to 21 on July 1, 1982; Kavanaugh did not turn 18 until Feb. 12, 1983. In a Fox News interview on Monday, Kavanaugh said, “Yes, there were parties. And the drinking age was 18. And yes, the seniors were legal.” In testimony Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he said all of his comments during the Fox interview were accurate and could be made part of the record. In plain terms, for all his spleen and outrage, Judge Kavanaugh lies about everything. In his earlier hearings, he lied about his judicial philosophy, and he lied about his days as a Republican operative, both in and out of the White House. On Monday, he lied to Martha McCallum of Fox News. On Thursday, he lied about his entire adolescence and his college days. He lied even when he didn't have to lie. He lied in preposterous ways easily disproven by common sense. (The "Devil's Triangle"? "Renate Alumnius"?) He lied like a toddler, like a guilty adolescent, and like a privileged scion of the white ruling class, which is a continuum with which we all are far too familiar. He lied and he dared the Democratic members of the committee, and the country, to call him on his lies. And now, he is a couple of easy steps away from having lied his way into a lifetime seat on the United States Supreme Court. This guy is going to be deciding constitutional issues for the next four decades, and the truth is not in him. The ballgame pretty much ended when Jeff Flake's endlessly tortured conscience led him to the completely predictable conclusion that, while Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was "credible," he would have to vote in favor of putting Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court because, as his official statement said: "What I do know is that our system of justice affords a presumption of innocence to the accused, absent corroborating evidence. That is what binds us to the rule of law. While some may argue that a different standard should apply regarding the Senate's advice and consent responsibilities, I believe that the Constitution's provisions of fairness and due process apply here as well." Lord, what a putz this guy is. Before the committee began its meeting on Friday, Flake was confronted by a group of women who had survived sexual assault. He tried to hide in an elevator. They followed him in there. This should happen to him every time he climbs into an elevator for the rest of his life. All that's left in this sorry epic is to count the votes. We will have the next 40 years to count the cost. ------------ ------------ RobertN, 5 minutes ago. YOU wrote, "What did he lie about in the hearing?" RobertN, "The legal age in that state was raised to 21 on July 1, 1982; Kavanaugh did not turn 18 until Feb. 12, 1983. In a Fox News interview on Monday, Kavanaugh said, “Yes, there were parties. And the drinking age was 18. And yes, the seniors were legal.” In testimony Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he said all of his comments during the Fox interview were accurate and could be made part of the record." | |
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| 09-29-18 10:41am - 2293 days | #1198 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
President Trump and the Golden Shower rumors. Trump is a man who enjoys sex. Or, at least, he seems to enjoy sex. He is in command. His advice to men: Grab women by the pussy. Take charge, and the little ladies will follow you everywhere. This is true advice, from the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. ------ ------ The go-between in the Trump Tower meeting offers clue to 'golden shower' claim in dossier Michael IsikoffChief Investigative Correspondent ,Yahoo News•September 28, 2018 Rob Goldstone (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: Mark Lennihan/AP) Rob Goldstone, the gadfly music publicist who set up and attended the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between a Kremlin-linked lawyer and top officials of the Trump campaign, thinks he may have a clue about one of the biggest mysteries of the Russiagate scandal: the origin of the still uncorroborated claim that Donald Trump watched prostitutes urinate on his bed in a Moscow hotel room. Goldstone said in a new interview that it “makes sense to me” the story might have its origins in an episode recounted in the book “Russian Roulette,” by this reporter and David Corn — a party at a raunchy Las Vegas nightclub called the Act in June 2013. Trump, Goldstone and his client, the Russian pop singer Emin Agalarov, the son of a prominent Russian businessman close to President Putin, were among those at the club on the evening of June 15, 2013. In an interview on the Yahoo News podcast Skullduggery, Goldstone described the Act as “supersexy burlesque meets Cirque de Soleil with all sorts of weird and wonderful things.” Among those weird things, as first reported in “Russian Roulette,” were regular skits involving simulated urination, colloquially called “golden showers.” One, called “Hot for Teacher,” featured scantily clad dancers posing as college students simulating urinating on their professor. Goldstone, the author of a new memoir, titled “Pop Stars, Pageants & Presidents,” said he could not remember whether the “Hot for Teacher” act or any similar skit was performed the night he and Agalarov were there with Trump at the club. But he said both he and Agalarov had in fact seen the urination act at a “sister” club to the Act in London called the Box, and possibly on another occasion at another Box club in New York. (The Act and the Box were both owned by nightclub impresario Simon Hammerstein. The Act, however, was closed in late 2013 after a Nevada judge found that its performances were “lewd” and “offensive” and violated state anti-obscenity laws.) Five months after the Las Vegas trip, Trump visited Moscow for the finals of the Miss Universe contest, which he owned at the time. It was from this trip that arose the uncorroborated report by a former British spy that Trump, while staying at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, employed “a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him.” The ex-spy, Christopher Steele, hired by a political research firm retained by a law firm working for the Clinton campaign, wrote a series of memos, known as the “dossier,” that alleged that Russian intelligence had “kompromat” (compromising information) on Trump that included a tape of the episode. The idea that Trump might have been in the audience for the urination act in Las Vegas has been suggested as a possible inspiration for the event Steele described. Alternatively, Steele’s sources might have just heard about the Las Vegas show, or the one seen by Agalarov and Goldstone in London. The claims in Steele’s dossier are disputed, and there has been no corroboration of the “golden showers” story. Goldstone and Agalarov accompanied Trump for much for the time he was in Moscow. Goldstone thinks the second explanation — that the stories got mixed up in the telling — is the likely one. That “hypothesis makes more sense to me than what’s alleged in the Steele dossier, that it happened at the Ritz-Carlton,” he said in his Skullduggery interview. Goldstone gave a number of reasons for discounting Steele’s account: He had personally booked Trump’s room at the Ritz-Carlton, switching it just two days before his arrival from the InterContinental hotel. Goldstone had stayed at the Ritz-Carlton himself and “was friends with people” at the hotel — and never heard anything at the time about Trump cavorting with prostitutes there. Moreover, Goldstone, who was with Trump for much of his brief trip, said the mogul had a tight schedule the entire time he was there. On his one night in Moscow, Trump returned to the Ritz-Carlton after a party at 1:30 a.m. and was up the next morning at 7 for the taping of a music video in which he appeared with Emin Agalarov. “Now I do understand that it may not take an enormous amount of time for people to pee on each other in your presence,” Goldstone said. “However, he’s a known germaphobe… If you’re a germaphobe, wouldn’t you need somebody to come in and change the beds, do something? Where are those people?” “Is this something that Emin would have been into?” Goldstone was asked. “People peeing on each other?” he replied. “Well I mean again, I’m not usually in Emin’s bedroom during the night, but I mean, I don’t know is the answer. I’d hate to say no and then have him hear this and say to somebody actually, I have a PhD in it. I mean I don’t know. But the point is, I just believe again, I go back to human nature that somebody somewhere… People sell stories.” Goldstone’s comments are ultimately inconclusive. The fact that he and Agalarov saw a urination performance similar to the one described in the Steele dossier does not prove there is a connection. But his comments add one more layer of intrigue to what became the most sensational allegation about Trump’s Russia connections, less because of its salaciousness than the implication that the Kremlin might be in a position to blackmail the American president — a still unproven claim that more than a year and half after it first surfaced remains a subject of continued speculation and debate. | |
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| 09-28-18 11:07pm - 2293 days | #1197 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
A Republican Yale drinking buddy of Kavanaugh's tells CNN he lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee September 28, 2018 When Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh told Fox News he never drank to excess, several of his Yale classmates were so outraged they decided to set the record straight. One of them, Lynne Brookes, also accepted Chris Cuomo's invitation to join him on CNN after Kavanaugh repeated his claim of relative sobriety under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Cuomo asked Brookes — a Republican who admires Kavanaugh's judicial record — why she changed her mind. "I'll tell you, Chris, I watched the whole hearing, and a number of my Yale colleagues and I were extremely disappointed in Brett Kavanaugh's characterization of himself and the way that he evaded his excessive drinking question" and "was lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee today," Brookes said. "There is no doubt in my mind that while at Yale, he was a big partier, often drank to excess, and there had to be a number of nights where he does not remember." She said she can "almost guarantee" he doesn't remember a night she witnessed where he was "stumbling drunk, in a ridiculous costume, saying really dumb things" to pledge a fraternity. Brookes also dismissed Kavanaugh's defense that his studies and sports precluded heavy drinking, noting she played two varsity sports. "I studied really hard, too," she said. "I went to Wharton business school, I did very well at Yale, I also drank to excess many nights with Brett Kavanaugh." She recounted a party where Kavanaugh and Chris Dudley, one of his character witnesses, humiliated a female student by barging in on her in a compromising position. "I'm not saying it's wrong that he drank," Cuomo concluded after the interview, but "if he's going to be the ultimate judge of truth in our society, a Supreme Court justice, and at 53 years old he's going to lie about what he did when he was 15, what else will he lie about?" | |
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| 09-28-18 10:40pm - 2293 days | #1196 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
I've said that Kavanaugh lied under oath when testifying. Democratic lawyers who go through his testimony should easily be able to find instances where he lied. Here is an article that shows one instance where Kavanaugh lied. As I said before, Kavanaugh can try to wiggle his way around the truth, by offering excuses for his lies, but it seems easy to prove he lied. Why the Democrats are not charging him with perjury is a mystery to me. The Republicans, if Kavanaugh was a Democratic candidate, would not let him off so easily. ------- ------- Politics Kavanaugh Testified That 'The Drinking Age Was 18.' Not In Maryland When He Was 18. HuffPost Mary Papenfuss,HuffPost 3 hours ago Fending off the accusation that he drunkenly assaulted a 15-year-old when he was a teen, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday that it was legal to drink alcohol at age 18 for “most of the time” he was in high school. Technically, that statement is true ― but it certainly wasn’t legal for Kavanaugh, who lived in Maryland. In the summer of 1982, seven months before he turned 18, the state raised the legal drinking age for beer and wine from 18 to 21. (It was already 21 for hard liquor.) Those who were 18 or older at the time were “grandfathered” in, so they could continue to drink legally. That, however, did not apply to Kavanaugh: He didn’t turn 18 until the following February. “Yes, we drank beer, my friends and I, boys and girls,” Kavanaugh told the committee. “I liked beer. I still like beer. The drinking age, as I noted, was 18, so the seniors were legal. Senior year in high school, people were legal to drink ... Sometimes probably had too many beers.” He also told Fox News in his interview Monday: “Yes, there were parties, and yes, the drinking age was 18. And yes, the seniors were legal and had beer there.” In his introductory remarks before the committee, Kavanaugh said that everything he said on the network could be entered as testimony. The legal drinking age was 18 in Washington, D.C., throughout the years Kavanaugh attended Georgetown Prep. He could have legally purchased and consumed alcohol in the capital — but only in the last four months of his senior year, after he turned 18. Most students attending Georgetown Prep lived in Maryland, however. Christine Blasey Ford has accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault at a house party in suburban Maryland, where she said both Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge were “stumbling drunk.” She also testified that she had a beer. (Kavanaugh was 17 at that time; Blasey was 15.) The White House argued Friday that Kavanaugh’s testimony about drinking was not intended to be misleading, but provided “context” about how Maryland high schoolers obtained beer. Kavanaugh “never suggested that all of his high school drinking was of legal age,” White House spokesman Raj Shah said in a statement reported by The Associated Press. Shah insisted that Kavanaugh had said the legal drinking age was 18 because it “allowed friends to legally purchase beer, and for him to drink at high school parties,” the AP reported. Under Maryland law, a person under the age of 21 cannot consume or possess alcohol except in certain circumstances, including in a private home with the consent and under the supervision of an adult over the age of 21. In his memoir, Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk, Judge recounts years of local high school parties and beach getaways involving alcohol. He wrote that he and his friends aimed to consume 100 kegs of beer their senior year. Kavanaugh’s bio in the senior yearbook notes that he was a member of the “Keg City Club (treasurer) — 100 Kegs or Bust.” This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 09-28-18 09:21pm - 2293 days | #1195 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fox news says the FBI investigation could be finished in one hour or less. Kavanaugh is a great man, the best choice for the seat on the Supreme Court. The Democrats are using shameful ploys to stop Kavanaugh. We must be honest and fair, and apologize to Kavanaugh for his trials and tribulations, and give him a few hundred thousand dollars for his pain and suffering. Shame on the scumbag Democrats for using Dr. Ford so shamefully. | |
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| 09-28-18 09:14pm - 2293 days | #1194 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Trump agrees to FBI probe of Kavanaugh. However, the FBI probe will only last one week, and be limited in scope. So how much evidence will the FBI probe produce? How deep will the probe go? Trump must be hoping Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the Supreme Court, where Kavanaugh, as a conservative, will protect Trump from any lawsuits and investigations at the federal level. Remember, it was the Supreme Court, in 1974, that forced Nixon to release his secret tapes. Nixon resigned shortly after. If the Supreme Court had ruled in Nixon's favor, that executive privilege (the power of the presidency) meant the tapes were secret, Nixon would not have resigned. They were proof of criminal acts by Richard Nixon. ------- ------- Trump agrees to FBI probe of Kavanaugh, bows to Flake, Dems Associated Press LISA MASCARO, ALAN FRAM and MARY CLARE JALONICK,Associated Press 4 hours ago WASHINGTON (AP) — Reversing course, President Donald Trump bowed to Democrats' demands Friday for a deeper FBI investigation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after Republican Sen. Jeff Flake balked at voting for confirmation without it — a sudden turn that left Senate approval newly uncertain amid allegations of sexual assault. Kavanaugh's nomination had appeared back on track earlier Friday when he cleared a key hurdle at the Senate Judiciary Committee. But that advance came with an asterisk. Flake indicated he would take the next steps — leading to full Senate approval — only after the further background probe, and there were suggestions that other moderate Republicans might join his revolt. The abrupt developments gave senators, the White House and millions of Americans following the drama at home hardly a chance to catch their breath after Thursday's emotional Senate hearing featuring Kavanaugh angrily defending himself and accuser Christine Blasey Ford determinedly insisting he assaulted her when they were teens. Emotions were still running high Friday, and protesters confronted senators in the halls. "The country is being ripped apart here," said Flake. After he took his stance, Republican leaders had little choice but to slow their rush to confirm Kavanaugh, whom they had hoped to have in place shortly after the new court term begins Monday. Trump quietly followed suit, though he had vigorously resisted asking the FBI to probe the allegations of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh, now being raised by three women. One day earlier, he had blistered the Senate process as "a total sham," accused Democrats of a conspiracy of obstruction and declared on Twitter, "The Senate must vote!" The new timeline puts Trump's nominee in further peril and pushes the politically risky vote for senators closer to the November congressional elections. It also means that any cases the Supreme Court hears before a ninth justice is in place will be decided by just eight, raising the possibility of tie votes. It was clear Republicans were still short of votes for final Senate approval after Thursday's hearing. They convened late into the evening in a room in the Capitol with various senators, including Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, raising pointed questions, according to those familiar with the private meeting but granted anonymity to discuss it. Republican leaders said — and Trump ordered — that the new probe be "limited in scope." But there was no specific direction as to what that might include. Two other women besides Ford have also lodged public sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh. Democrats have been particularly focused on getting more information from Mark Judge, a high school friend of Kavanaugh who Ford said was also in the room during her alleged assault. Judge has said he does not recall any such incident. In a new letter to the Senate panel, he said he would cooperate with any law enforcement agency assigned to investigate "confidentially." Kavanaugh issued his own statement through the White House saying he's been interviewed by the FBI before, done "background" calls with the Senate and answered questions under oath "about every topic" senators have asked. "I've done everything they have requested and will continue to cooperate," said the 53-year-old judge. Flake, a key moderate Republican, was at the center of Friday's uncertainty. In the morning, he announced he would support Kavanaugh's nomination. Shortly after, he was confronted in an elevator by two women who, through tears, said they were sexual assault victims and implored him to change his mind. "Look at me and tell me that it doesn't matter what happened to me," said 23-year-old Maria Gallagher, a volunteer with a liberal advocacy group. The confrontation was captured by television cameras. Soon he was working on a new deal with his Republican colleagues and Democrats in a Judiciary Committee anteroom. Flake announced he would vote to advance Kavanaugh's nomination to the full Senate only if the FBI were to investigate. Democrats have been calling for such a probe, though Republicans and the White House have insisted it was unnecessary. The committee vote was 11-10 along party lines. Attention quickly turned to a handful of undeclared senators. Two other key Republicans, Collins and Murkowski, said they backed the plan after they and other GOP senators met for an hour in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's office in the Capitol. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin said he supported Flake's call for a further probe "so that our country can have confidence in the outcome of this vote." With a 51-49 majority, Senate Republicans have little margin for error on a final vote, especially given the fact that several Democrats facing tough re-election prospects this fall announced their opposition to Kavanaugh on Friday. Bill Nelson of Florida, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana all said they would vote no. Flake's vote on final approval is not assured either. Some Republicans still resisted the delay but went along with the plan that may be the only way salvage Kavanaugh's confirmation. "I think it's overkill," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. "But they have a right to request it." The FBI conducts background checks for federal nominees, but the agency does not make judgments on the credibility or significance of allegations. It compiles information about the nominee's past and provides its findings to the White House, which passes them along to the committee. Republicans say reopening the FBI investigation is unnecessary because committee members have had the opportunity to question both Kavanaugh and Ford and other potential witnesses have submitted sworn statements. Agents could interview accusers and witnesses and gather additional evidence or details that could help corroborate or disprove the allegations. ___ Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Matthew Daly, Juliet Linderman, Eric Tucker, Julie Pace and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report. | |
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| 09-28-18 08:48pm - 2293 days | #1193 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Terrible news for the United States government. A judge says that Congressional Democrats can sue Trump, our President and Commander in Chief, for illegally profiting from his position as President. This is terrible news for Trump. Maybe he will have to give back part of his illegal profits. Maybe he will even have to serve time in jail or prison. Will they hold open the position of President and Commander in Chief if Trump serves time in jail? Or will they promote Mike Pence, from Chief Ass Licker to Commander in Chief? The US government is fighting tooth and nail to allow Donald Trump to keep his profits. But this is a case of Congress fighting for power, and the President fighting for profits and power. Trump has more to gain, and more to lose: Congress will not be able to take the illegal profits and put them into their own pockets. ---- ---- Congressional Democrats Can Sue Trump Over Emoluments, Judge Says By Andrew M Harris and Daniel Flatley September 28, 2018, 1:57 PM PDT Updated on September 28, 2018, 7:47 PM PDT U.S. judge rejects administration bid to dismiss lawsuit Lawmakers want president to come to them for permissions Almost 200 Congressional Democrats got a go-ahead from a judge to pursue a lawsuit claiming that Donald Trump is violating a Constitutional ban on receiving benefits from foreign governments without their permission while he’s president. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington on Friday denied a Justice Department request to dismiss the lawsuit, filed last year by Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and other members of the House and Senate. The judge ruled they have legal standing to pursue their claim, while deferring his decision on the merits of the dispute. It’s another loss for the president who is fighting claims in three courts that he’s illegally profiting from his position. He twice failed to have a Maryland federal court lawsuit thrown out, where the state’s attorney general and his District of Columbia counterpart claim Trump is illegally taking payments from foreign and state governments at his Washington hotel. The congressional Democrats are seeking an order compelling Trump to notify Congress when he’s offered an emolument, giving them the option to vote on whether he can accept it. Blumenthal has called the emoluments clauses the Constitution’s "premier anti-corruption provision." Justice Department spokeswoman Kelly Laco said, “We believe this case should be dismissed, and we will continue to defend the president in court." The White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Blumenthal called the judge’s ruling a “a triumph for the rule of law” during a conference call with reporters and said it would prove that no president is above the law. New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who joined in the suit, also praised the court’s decision. The judge’s ruling was welcomed by Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar who has been fighting the president in court and on Twitter. Trump said he stepped down from running his $3 billion empire but retained his ownership interests, a decision the Democrats say violates the Foreign Emoluments clause because he’s getting payments from foreign governments without congressional approval. While the Democrats claimed they’re being denied the right to vote on the benefits, attorneys for the president say the matter should be resolved in Congress, not in court. Justice Department lawyer Brett Shumate told Sullivan on June 7 that the legislators are always free to vote on whether the president can accept such benefits, meaning they didn’t suffer a legally recognizable injury giving them standing to sue. The judge disagreed in his 58-page ruling. "Legislation on the emoluments issue does not provide an adequate remedy," and would compel the court to ignore the clause which, Sullivan said, "places the burden on the president to convince a majority of members of Congress to consent." Legislation, as suggested by Trump’s lawyers, "flips this burden, placing the burden on Members of Congress to convince a majority of their colleagues to enact the suggested legislation. This is not what the clause requires." The cases are Blumenthal v. Trump, 17-cv-1154, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington) and The District of Columbia v. Trump, 17-cv-1596, U.S. District Court, District of Maryland (Greenbelt). — With assistance by Billy House, and Alyza Sebenius (Updates with comment from Nadler.) | |
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| 09-28-18 08:31pm - 2293 days | #1192 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Juanita Broaddrick claimed that Bill Clinton raped her 20 years ago. Several polls at the time found that the American public did not believe her. Now, with the Me Too movement, some journalists are more ready to believe her claim that Clinton raped her. However, Broaddrick says she does not believe Christine Ford claims of attempted rape. Broaddrick says Christine Ford's story does not have enough evidence to be believed. Christine Ford is asking for the FBI to investigate her claims. Christine Ford is asking for possible witnesses to be investigated. The Senate committee, run by Republicans, denies these requests. They don't want more evidence. They have enough evidence to hear the case, and determine, in a fair and open manner, that Brett Kavanaugh is an honorable man who deserves to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. (Both Democrats and Republicans are biased, but the Republicans seem to be more biased. And more effective in their attacks and lies.) Christine Ford took a polygraph test, to see if she was lying. Brett Kavanagh did not take a polygraph test. He said he would take a polygraph test if the committee requests it, but Kavanaugh said the polygraph test is not reliable. It is not regarded as evidence in a court of law. However, 2 years ago, Kavanaugh wrote an opinion that justified the use of polygraph tests: “As the Government notes, law enforcement agencies use polygraphs to test the credibility of witnesses and criminal defendants. Those agencies also use polygraphs to ‘screen applicants for security clearances so that they may be deemed suitable for work in critical law enforcement, defense, and intelligence collection roles.’ “The Government has satisfactorily explained how polygraph examinations serve law enforcement purposes.” So Kavanaugh thinks polygraph tests are useful for determining truth. Except he does not want to take a polygraph test himself. Is that because it might show he is lying? How many lies has Kavanaugh told under oath? I'm not a lawyer, but it seems clear to me he has lied under oath. As a lawyer, he might try to weasel out of it by claiming it's a matter of interpretation, or speaking loosely, but he has lied under oath at least several times, in statements that were false. Which is perjury. ------------- ------------- Juanita Broaddrick Is Glad You Believe Her, Would Like You To Ignore Christine Blasey Ford HuffPost Arthur Delaney,HuffPost Thu, Sep 27 7:48 PM PDT Juanita Broaddrick speaks after a town hall debate between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on Oct. 9, 2016, in St. Louis. Trump's campaign invited women who had accused Clinton's husband of sexual misconduct to attend the event. (Shannon Stapleton / Reuters) WASHINGTON ― In 1999, Juanita Broaddrick said then-President Bill Clinton had raped her 20 years earlier. She received skeptical media attention at that time, and several polls found that the American public didn’t believe her. Now, with the Me Too movement bringing greater scrutiny to bad men in politics, media and business ― and even ending their careers ― journalists have revisited Broaddrick’s story and found it more credible. Even Democratic voters now say they believe the sexual assault or harassment allegations against Clinton. For that, Broaddrick is glad. “It’s so much better now,” she told HuffPost, saying she particularly liked a 2017 New York Times op-ed by Michelle Goldberg. “I have so many that are in the middle and on the left that understand I am telling the truth.” But Broaddrick was in Washington on Thursday not just to tell her own story ― she’d also come to cast doubt on another woman’s sexual assault claim, giving interviews to reporters at a Concerned Women for America rally in support of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Inside the nearby Dirksen Senate Office Building, Christine Blasey Ford was preparing to testify that Kavanaugh had pinned her on a bed and groped her when they were both high school students in the early 1980s. “I believed he was going to rape me,” Blasey told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from screaming. This was what terrified me the most and has had the most lasting impact on my life.” Broaddrick said Democrats were hypocrites for choosing to elevate Blasey’s claims Thursday after disregarding Broaddrick’s two decades ago. “If you can listen to accusations like this, how can you not have listened to me back then?” she said. Specifically, Broaddrick said Senate Democrats refused to read a deposition she’d given investigators into Clinton’s misconduct. Broaddrick’s allegation had been omitted from the articles of impeachment that passed the House in 1998, however, which focused on his committing perjury while president, and only surfaced after the Senate acquitted Clinton the following year. Broaddrick has become increasingly outspoken as a conservative. She told BuzzFeed she voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 but in 2016 she was one of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s guests at a debate with Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton. There are some similarities between Broaddrick’s and Blasey’s stories. Both women waited decades to come forward about the alleged abuse. Both said they felt forced to reveal their identities because of pressure from investigative reporters. But Broaddrick said her own story, that Clinton raped her in an Arkansas motel room in 1978, is more credible, largely because several other people confirmed she told them about the incident shortly after it allegedly happened. Blasey waited more than 30 years before telling anyone. She first disclosed the assault in a 2012 therapy session with her husband. The fact that nobody said they heard about Blasey’s assault around the time it occurred, Broaddrick said, is why she finds it unbelievable. “You compare that with mine ― data, dates, people I told, injuries,” she said, referring to her claim that Clinton bit her lip. “I think she’s casting a very dark shadow on real victims,” Broaddrick said. Republicans have said the lack of contemporaneous corroborating evidence is Blasey’s biggest problem. Her lawyers provided sworn affidavits from her husband and three friends who said they’d heard her mention she’d been assaulted by Kavanaugh before he was nominated to the Supreme Court, but all the testimonials are from 2012 or later. “Those are not people who witnessed the alleged event,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told HuffPost. “All the people she identified as witnessing the alleged event said they can’t confirm it.” The only person other person Blasey said was in the room was Mark Judge, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s who has said he never saw the judge behave in the way Blasey described. But Republicans have shown little interest in getting further testimony from Judge, a conservative writer. Broaddrick said she hadn’t heard about the people who’ve said Blasey told them about her allegation before Kavanaugh became Trump’s nominee. “I’ll have to read up on that,” she said. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 09-28-18 12:45pm - 2294 days | #1190 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
If Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court, at least we will know a few things: A practiced liar and hypocrite will be interpreting the laws of the land. Conservatives can screw you coming and going, and bless you with God's holy grace. Trump is a lying piece of shit, and Kavanaugh is another lying piece of shit. ==== ==== 'Boofing' and 'ralphing' and other doubts about Kavanaugh's testimony Christopher WilsonEditor Yahoo News•September 28, 2018 Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday covered a lot of ground. In a 45-minute opening statement marked by bellowing defiance alternating with hurt tears, Kavanaugh denounced the allegations against him by Christine Blasey Ford as part of a left-wing conspiracy and addressed his alcohol consumption, his treatment of women, and obscure slang references in his high school yearbook. Along the way he veered from the truth, sometimes offering explanations that conflicted with evidence or definitions that were unverifiable but raised questions. Some points worth mentioning: Statements by other witnesses, including Mark Judge Repeatedly through the course of the hearing, Kavanaugh said that Ford’s account was contradicted by four people who she said were at the party where she claims she was assaulted. This is not true, as all four potential witnesses said they didn’t remember it happening but didn’t specifically say Kavanaugh didn’t do it. Leland Keyser, Ford’s friend who she said was at the gathering with her the night of the assault, has said she didn’t remember the party but not that Ford was lying. Among the witnesses who have said they don’t recall the events is Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s high school friend, who Ford claims was the only other person in the bedroom while Kavanaugh was drunkenly groping her. During Thursday’s hearing, Kavanaugh said, “Mark Judge has provided sworn statement saying this didn’t happen.” That sentence isn’t true. Judge discussed the allegations not in a sworn statement but in a letter from his lawyer. He doesn’t say that the assault didn’t happen but that he had “no memory of the alleged incident.” Judge submitted another signed letter Thursday night repeating the statement. Republicans have refused Ford’s request to seek testimony from Judge — a recovering alcoholic who has written extensively about his hard-partying high school years and included in his memoir a heavy-drinking character named Bart O’Kavanaugh. One of Judge’s ex-girlfriends has said she is willing to testify that Judge once told her of an incident where he and other unnamed boys took turns having sex with a drunken woman. Per a Washington Post report, Judge is currently hiding out at a Delaware beach house. Watching Ford’s testimony Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., in her last question to Kavanaugh asked if he had watched Ford’s testimony earlier in the day. Kavanaugh said he had not, but the Wall Street Journal reported earlier in the day that a committee aide told them Kavanaugh was indeed watching Ford’s testimony on a monitor elsewhere in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Yearbook slang Kavanaugh was questioned on several references in his calendar and yearbook. He claimed that “boofing” referred to “flatulence” and “devil’s triangle” was a drinking game. These definitions conflicted with interviews of Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep classmates and online slang dictionaries that define “boofing” as drug or alcohol use and “devil’s triangle” as a sexual encounter consisting of two men and one woman. Kavanaugh also said the mention in his yearbook of “Renate Alumnius” was a tribute to Renate Schroeder, who attended a nearby Catholic girls school. “That yearbook reference was clumsily intended to show affection, and that she was one of us,” said Kavanaugh during Thursday’s hearing. That statement conflicts with those of other classmates, other references in the yearbook and the claim that Schroeder, who now goes by Dolphin, didn’t know about it at the time, and regards the phrase as a slur on her chastity. “I learned about these yearbook pages only a few days ago,” she said in a statement to the New York Times. “I don’t know what ‘Renate Alumnus’ actually means. I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things, but the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue. I pray their daughters are never treated this way. I will have no further comment.” “They were very disrespectful, at least verbally, with Renate,” said Sean Hagan, a Georgetown Prep student at the time, referring to Judge Kavanaugh and his football teammates in an interview with Times. “I can’t express how disgusted I am with them, then and now.” Dolphin was one of the 65 women to sign a letter in support of Kavanaugh’s character, but she did so before she was aware of the yearbook reference. Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., questions Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Sept. 27, 2018. (Photo: Win McNamee/pool via Reuters) “Ralph Club” In Kavanaugh’s yearbook, it also lists him as “Beach Week Ralph Club — Biggest Contributor.” Beach Week was a week of partying attended by Kavanaugh and his classmates the summer of the alleged result. Kavanaugh said that “ralphing” was a euphemism for throwing up, but that it didn’t imply heavy drinking on his part, but a weak stomach and an intolerance for spicy food. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse tried to pin Kavanaugh down on his drinking habits. Kavanaugh didn’t answer directly but implied that frequent partying would have been incompatible with his high school record of high grades, varsity sports and volunteer work. “So the vomiting that you reference in the Ralph Club reference related to the consumption of alcohol?” asked Whitehouse. “Senator, I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school. Captain of the varsity basketball team,” said Kavanaugh. “Got in Yale College. When I got into Yale College, got into Yale Law School. Worked my tail off.” Drinking age Kavanaugh has said that the drinking age in Maryland was 18 for most of his time in high school and that by the time he was a senior, whatever drinking he did was legal. Kavanaugh graduated from Georgetown Prep in 1983. Maryland raised the drinking age to 21 on July 1, 1982, so that the summer before his senior year he would not have been old enough to legally drink. Polygraph test Ford took a lie detector test prior to her testimony and Harris asked Kavanaugh if he had done the same. “No, I’ll do whatever the committee wants. Of course, those are not admissible in federal court,” replied Kavanaugh. “They’re not admissible in federal court because they are not reliable, as you know.” Kavanaugh’s justified skepticism of polygraphs Thursday is a departure from an opinion he wrote two years ago in defense of the tests: “As the Government notes, law enforcement agencies use polygraphs to test the credibility of witnesses and criminal defendants. Those agencies also use polygraphs to ‘screen applicants for security clearances so that they may be deemed suitable for work in critical law enforcement, defense, and intelligence collection roles.’ “The Government has satisfactorily explained how polygraph examinations serve law enforcement purposes.” _____ | |
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| 09-28-18 11:41am - 2294 days | #11 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Is this still on topic? Too much time spent on the computer can zombify you: ------ ------ Learn From These Bugs. Don't Let Social Media Zombify You Author: Matt SimonMatt Simon science 09.25.18 09:00 am Learn From These Bugs. Don't Let Social Media Zombify You Gabriel Alcala You’ve heard that social media is screwing with your brain. Maybe you even read about it on social media. (So meta; so messed up.) The neurochemical culprit, dopamine, spikes when you like and get liked, share and are shared. You’ve probably also heard scientists compare the affliction to drug or alcohol addiction. That’s fair. The same part of the brain lights up. Scroll, scroll, scroll. It’s a phenomenon now so pervasive that it’s got a name: zombie scrolling syndrome. (The security company McAfee coined the phrase in 2016.) We are the undead of lore, shambling through the world, moaning and groaning with half-closed eyes. I’d like to be able to tell you this is a fantastical bit of exaggeration, that we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. I can do no such thing. The analogy, it turns out, has legs. Consider parasites. An astonishing number of them exist in nature, from worms to wasps, and some have the power of mind control. Or, said another way, zombification. And these fiends are doing it in—gulp—ways that bring to mind social media. Take the jewel wasp. She grabs a cockroach twice her size and drives her stinger through the poor thing’s neck and into its head, feeling around the brain before injecting nonlethal venom in two precise spots. (OK, not quite like Facebook, but stay with me.) Post-surgery, the cockroach just keeps grooming itself while the wasp drags it into a burrow by its antenna. The wasp then lays an egg on the cockroach’s leg, seals the tomb, and goes about her life. In a few days, the wasp egg hatches into a larva that latches onto the roach and drinks its bodily fluids. Again, the bug doesn’t complain. It’s not paralyzed; it’s fully capable of breaking out of its prison. But the roach doesn’t. As the fluids run dry, the larva burrows into the body to eat the organs one by one, hollowing out the roach’s abdomen while the thing is still alive (read: undead). Eventually it emerges as an adult wasp, finally killing its host. According to researchers, the wasp’s secret appears to be—wait for it—dopamine. The wasp loads up its venom with the neurotransmitter, and that cocktail alters the roach’s behavior in ways scientists are only beginning to understand. Weirdly, in cockroaches and other creatures, dopamine regulates grooming, hence the insect’s fanatical insistence on cleaning itself instead of running for its life. (Not like humans would ever primp for a totally natural and spontaneous selfie.) LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Internet Addiction The weapon of choice for other zombifiers is serotonin, another well-studied neurotransmitter. There’s a tiny worm, for instance, that begins life in the stomach of crustaceans called amphipods. Then the worm finds itself with a problem. To live, it has to get into the stomach of a bird, which means it needs its host to get noticed. Complicating things, fish love to eat amphipods. That’s bad for our protagonist: In a fish belly, the worm will dissolve. So the worm mind-controls its crustacean to spend more time at the pond’s surface, where it’s likelier to draw the attention of birds. That little baby worm can even change its host’s color to a more conspicuous hue. The worm itself isn’t releasing serotonin; somehow it’s short-circuiting the amphipod’s nervous system to overproduce the chemical. Researchers think this may cause the victim to mistake light for darkness. Instead of diving into the safety of the murky depths, it ascends to the surface—and to death from above. Whatever their strategy, zombifying parasites are hacking biology. And so, with their A/B-tested, keep-you-permascrolling tactics, are the titans of social media. Like any living creature, we are manipulable—our brains are chemical soups, programmed to need and be needed. Prehistorically, it’s what helped us stick together to not get eaten. “It was clearly adaptive to be so sensitive to social stimuli,” says UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield. “But evolution never expected that we would be getting social stimuli from people we don’t even know.” We’re not only vulnerable, in other words. We also lack defenses. There’s a good reason that more than half the organisms on earth are parasites: If you live off the nutrients and energy of someone else, you don’t have to run around and hunt for yourself. It’s a hell of an effective strategy. And one thing is clear: You don’t want to be the hunted. If you live off the energy of someone else, you don’t have to hunt for yourself. But there might be hope. Not every parasitic relationship ends in death. Take it from crickets. All around the world, threadlike critters called horsehair worms grow in the bellies of crickets, feeding on their juices. Once the worms get big enough, they persuade their hosts to do the unthinkable: leap into a stream or pond and risk drowning (or death by fish). In the water the worm makes its move, drilling through the cricket’s belly and swimming away to find fellow worms to mate with. Amazingly, the cricket can survive a parasite many times its length squirming out of its body, provided it swims to shore afterward. Scientists know the horsehair worms are releasing a chemical concoction that instructs the crickets to go full kamikaze. But in this case, the cricket does well by putting its life in danger and jumping in the drink—if it can’t get rid of the worm, the body snatcher will die in its belly and kill its host. Biologists call this, no joke, the mafia hypothesis: Give in to the bullying or die. So we don’t have to be the cockroach or the amphipod. We can be the cricket, with the power to purge our systems of zombifying parasites. When you uninstall Facebook on your phone or delete your Instagram account, you’re taking a leap into that pond. You might belly flop, but it’s unlikely you’ll drown. And you won’t get eaten by a fish. Probably. | |
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| 09-28-18 11:27am - 2294 days | #10 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
This article is not precisely on the topic of porn or AI, but it presents the duality of choosing a treatment by antibiotics versus surgery. There is no simple conclusion, because the article states further studies need to be done. But the article shows that instead of surgery, appendicitis can be treated with antibiotics. In my mind, that is similar to real world (cutting with a knife to remove part of the body) versus less-real world (giving patients chemicals to treat a condition). Or maybe I'm reaching too far. Drugs/chemicals can alter the human body just as much as the physical world (temperature, pressure/cutting from external objects, etc.) On a practical basis, if antibiotics can cure appendicitis, I'm all for it: there are often plenty of negative side-effects from surgery. I had open heart surgery. I needed it after a heart attack. But they took out a vein to do the surgery, and my feet and leg have swollen ever since, leading to a lot of time getting treatment for the skin on my leg splitting open from too much pressure, plus infections in my leg made worse by the poor circulation-so needing minor surgery to treat the infections-plus the risk of losing the leg if an infection in the leg does not respond to treatment. Sometimes doctors go for aggressive surgery, which can have dangerous or harmful side effects. I had surgery for a different condition: the doctor wanted to remove a large part of my tongue, plus several lymph nodes in my neck. The operation would have been major (my words), lasting several hours, with several days recuperating in the hospital. I went to another doctor: he removed a much smaller part of my tongue, nothing else, and I was released a few hours after the operation. The first doctor didn't bother explaining all the possible risks of the aggressive treatment. I read his report later, where it discussed possible trauma to the neck and other risks. I'm fine. And really glad I saw the second doctor. Much less pain and much less invasive surgery from the second doctor, with less risk of side effects from the surgery. .... .... After century of removing appendixes, docs find antibiotics can be enough In a five-year follow-up, nearly two-thirds of patients never needed surgery. Beth Mole - 9/26/2018, 11:59 AM After more than a century of slicing tiny, inflamed organs from people’s guts, doctors have found that surgery may not be necessary after all—a simple course of antibiotics can be just as effective at treating appendicitis as going under the knife. The revelation comes from a large, randomized trial out of Finland, published Tuesday, September 25, in JAMA. Despite upending a long-held standard of care, the study’s finding is not entirely surprising; it follows several other randomized trials over the years that had carved out evidence that antibiotics alone can treat an acute appendicitis. Those studies, however, left some dangling questions, including if the antibiotics just improved the situation temporarily and if initial drug treatments left patients worse off later if they did need surgery. The new JAMA study, with its full, five-year follow-up, effectively cauterised those remaining issues. Nearly two-thirds of the patients randomly assigned in the study to get antibiotics for an uncomplicated appendicitis didn’t end up needing surgery in the follow-up time, the Finnish authors, based at the University of Turku, report. And those drug-treated patients that did end up getting an appendectomy later were not worse off for the delay in surgery. “This long-term follow-up supports the feasibility of antibiotic treatment alone as an alternative to surgery for uncomplicated acute appendicitis,” the authors conclude. The finding suggests that many appendicitis patients could be spared the risks of surgical procedures, such as infections. They may also be able to save money by not needing such an invasive procedure (although the study didn’t compare costs), and they could reap the benefits of shorter treatment and recovery times. Researchers will have to collect more data to back up those benefits, though. For their initial look at the simpler appendicitis treatment, researchers led by Paulina Salminen randomly assigned 530 patients that showed up in the hospital with an acute, uncomplicated appendicitis to get either a standard, open surgery to remove their inflamed organ or a course of antibiotics. (By “uncomplicated,” the authors mean there weren’t other issues like perforation, abscess, or suspicion of a tumor.) The patients ranged in age from 18 to 60 and enrolled in the trial between November 2009 and June 2012. Those who went under the knife stayed in the hospital for a median of three days, while the antibiotic-treated patients stayed in the hospital for three days to get intravenous drugs, which were then followed by seven days of oral antibiotics out of the hospital. A couple of patients were lost in follow-up, including one from an unrelated death, leaving 272 patients in the surgery group and 256 in the antibiotic group. In the antibiotic group, 70 patients ended up having surgery within the first year of the treatment. Within the subsequent five years, 30 others also underwent surgery. That left 156 antibiotic-treated patients, or about 61 percent, who were able to escape the scalpel. Vestigial medicine The authors think that percentage could be even higher in follow-up studies. They note that the decision to undergo surgery after the initial randomization was entirely up to the patients’ treating surgeons—most of whom weren’t involved in the trial and some of whom were skeptical of the idea that antibiotics alone could treat appendicitis. This fact, the authors note, could have artificially inflated the number of people who ended up getting an appendectomy. They point out that seven of the 100 antibiotic-treated patients who underwent surgery didn’t actually have evidence of appendicitis at the time of their surgery, based on their medical records. Still, going with antibiotics first meant fewer complications and faster recoveries overall. The antibiotic group had a complication rate of 6.5 percent, whereas those assigned to surgery had a rate of 24 percent, mostly due to infections. Of the 100 antibiotic-treated patients who later had surgery, they had typical complication rates for the procedure. This suggests that delaying the surgery for this group didn’t lead to more problems. Complications or not, the antibiotic group overall took a median of 11 days of sick leave to recover, while the surgery group took 22 days. There were a couple of catches to the study that warrant follow-up. One big issue is that the study compared antibiotic treatment to standard, open surgery—not a more modern, minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery, which is now common in the US. If this had been the standard of care in the surgery group for this study, it might have shifted the cost-benefit scales, potentially reducing complication rates and recovery times. That said, the authors note that the antibiotic treatment was also heavy-handed in the study. The researchers went with a "conservative" three-day IV treatment followed by more oral antibiotics, which may have been overkill. They did this because “[w]hen this protocol was designed, there was little information available to guide the application of antibiotic treatment for appendicitis,” they note. Future studies could find that shorter, less intense courses of antibiotics could also do the trick, further reducing complication rates and treatment time. Last, the study didn’t compare costs of the interventions or the bills that would have been incurred by those in the two treatment groups. This will be another question to address in follow-up studies as doctors fine-tune the best way to handle appendicitis after all these years. | |
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| 09-28-18 10:48am - 2294 days | #9 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
CONTINUED FROM POST ABOVE: Japanese writer and dating sim enthusiast Honda Toru argues that moe is part of a broader “love revolution”. “Someday soon the hierarchy of real and artificial will break down,” he said in an interview in 2014. “This future will be about knowing that we are in love with fiction and accepting it … Someday we will be able to accept that the world of dreams is a good world, with a warmth and solace that cannot be found in human society.” Patrick Galbraith, an anthropologist who has studied moe and otaku culture in Japan for many years, says that the decades-long existence of dating simulations in Japan has fostered a more accepting attitude to intimacy with virtual characters. “A lot of gamers in Japan could be very angry, but they’re not,” he said. “This is because society tells them, mostly, that their new way of loving is OK. These are people are not seen as unwell, but just trying to live otherwise.” Galbraith also points out that these simulated dating environments provide a safe space to flirt without the risk of misreading social cues or being rejected. “If we would just stop pressuring people to act only within a limited set of social norms,” he said, “maybe we would have fewer toxic individuals.” But not all gamers who play dating sims feel that they are part of a “love revolution” or ushering a new era of digital intimacy. Cecilia d’Anastasio, a game journalist who has written about Mystic Messenger, told me that most people who play the game do so because “it is fun, it is compelling, there is a narrative, it lets you master a new skill”. In fact, there are lots of dating sims players who find the idea that they are somehow falling in love with the characters in the game slightly perverse. In February, Pape Games, the developer that made Love and Producer, released an ad that portrayed a young woman telling her mother that she had finally found a husband, but that the husband was a character in the game. On Weibo, many fans of Love and Producer responded angrily. “So, this is what the company thinks about its loyal gamers?” said one. “As a married women who has a stable income and relationship, I only play this game because I like the voices of the character,” another said. “I can clearly distinguish the virtual world from reality.” But the capacity to distinguish between the real and the virtual may become harder over the next decade as game developers use AI and sophisticated natural-language processing to make characters more interactive and realistic. Aaron Reed, who works at SpiritAI – a tech company that is doing just that – told me that while we are still decades away from designing anything as persuasive as Samantha in Her, more human-like characters are going to become pervasive in the coming years. “Obviously as the technology gets better and the interactivity increases we’re going to be able to form closer connections to characters in games,” Reed said. “They will operate with greater flexibility and ultimately seem more lifelike and easier to connect to.” But for Wild Rose and many of the other dating sims enthusiasts I spoke to, making the characters more “human” wasn’t particularly exciting or even desired. Saeran didn’t need to be real for her to care about him. And she was well aware that there were probably tens of thousands of other gamers out there who he said the same loving things to. But it didn’t matter. For Wild Rose, intimacy with the virtual was something that could only be played out fully between the screen and her imagination. When she played Mystic Messenger, she allowed herself to momentarily suspend disbelief and enter this virtual relationship. She told me that in this way, her love for Saeran was very similar to how she had loved anime characters as a young girl. “When my parents were at work I would watch anime cartoons. I became very attached to some of the characters and I would draw fantasy worlds where we lived together.” When she showed these drawings to her cousins, they made fun of her. “They teased me all the time for loving these characters, and now it’s the same as people who criticize my love for Saeran,” she said. “I don’t think Saeran is human. But I think my love for him can be real even if he isn’t.” As compelling as the simulated world of Mystic Messenger was, after a week, I couldn’t keep up with the endless messages and emails from Jaehee and my other “friends”. My life in the real world kept interfering with the development of my burgeoning virtual intimacy. That is, it was difficult to justify not making dinner because I had a chat scheduled with a character in a game. This form of digital intimacy didn’t captivate me in the way it did for Wild Rose. I found my conversations with her, also conducted via text, far more compelling than my conversations with Jaehee. But playing Mystic Messenger did make me rethink my relationship with other virtual characters that I communicate with through my phone, like Siri or Slackbot. What I learnt from Wild Rose, who stood at the vanguard of relations with these virtual others, is that when we interact with these characters we are engaged in a collective suspension of disbelief, allowing ourselves to imagine that they understand us, that they are kind of alive. Yet unlike Wild Rose, most of us do not acknowledge the role imagination plays in these relationships with the non-human. We pretend that these anthropomorphic algorithms are coming alive because of technological innovation alone, rather than cultural process and collective myth-making. It is at this point that we risk losing control of the fantasy. “It’s like how people love God,” Wild Rose said the last time we spoke. “They don’t see him. They never meet him. Yet they lay their faith and love in his hands. Why don’t people understand that’s the way I love Saeran?” | |
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| 09-28-18 10:45am - 2294 days | #8 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The Guardian Love in the time of AI: meet the people falling for scripted robots ‘I love him genuinely. I’ll never know his true feelings.’ Illustration: Bratislav Milenkovic A crop of dating simulations where the goal is to reach a virtual happily ever after have recently become hits. Are they a substitute for human companionship or a new type of digital intimacy? by Oscar Schwartz Wed 26 Sep 2018 05.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 26 Sep 2018 12.22 EDT I recently met a young woman named Wild Rose on an online chat forum. We struck up a conversation and within the first five minutes, Wild Rose – who is married, has a daughter, and lives in Texas with her in-laws – started telling me about her lover, a man called Saeran. Saeran, she told me, is the illegitimate son of a politician who had grown up with an abusive mother. He is handsome, has white blond hair, golden eyes, a large tattoo on his shoulder. Wild Rose said that when she first met him, her “heart literally ached” and her cheeks “flooded with blood”. She then paused and added: “But I don’t think Saeran loves me the way I love him. I love him genuinely. I’ll never know his true feelings.” The reason: Saeran isn’t human. He is a character in a mobile phone game called Mystic Messenger, which was released two years ago by Cheritz, a South Korean game developer. It has since been downloaded by millions of people worldwide. The game is a mix between a romance novel and Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie Her, in which a man develops a relationship with a Siri-like character. The primary aim of Mystic Messenger is to pursue a romantic relationship with one of a number of characters in the game, one of whom is Saeran. To cultivate intimacy with these virtual beings, you talk to them via a text message. The responses are pre-scripted, but feel dynamic and sincere. Winning the game is not about scoring points or beating a final boss; it is about reaching a “good ending” where you and your virtual lover live happily ever after. The idea of simulating romantic relationships through gaming is not unique to Mystic Messenger. This genre of game – often referred to as dating simulations or dating sims for short – emerged in the 1980s in Japan, where they were popular with a predominantly male audience. But since the rise of mobile and online gaming, dating sims have become popular outside Japan and with more diverse demographics. In the past year, there has been a bumper crop of hit dating sims, including Love and Producer, Dream Daddy and Doki Doki Literature Club. Unlike earlier generations of dating sims, where the action centered on erotic interactions with virtual girls, these games foreground conversations between players and characters, and often have nuanced and well-developed scripts. Mystic Messenger is one of the most popular of this new generation dating sim. Since dating sims first came out, they have been controversial. In Japan, many critics saw the rise of dating sims as a signifier of alienation, a retreat from human relationships in a machine-mediated society. And as the popularity of dating sims develops once again, similar concerns are resurfacing. But the growing community of people who play dating sims are mostly impervious to this disapproval. The most dedicated romantic gamers do not see their interactions with virtual characters as a substitute for human companionship, but as a new type of digital intimacy. As well as spending hours playing dating sims, fans chat with each other on online forums about their favorite characters and the contours of their virtual relationships. It was on one of these forums that I met Wild Rose. I had joined hoping to get a better understanding of why people play these games and whether the relationships they form with virtual characters possibly foreshadow a future in which the boundaries between real and virtual companionship will become increasingly blurry, if not irrelevant. When I first asked Wild Rose to explain how and why she fell in love with Saeran, she told me that if I had any hope of understanding, I had to first enter the world of Mystic Messenger and experience it for myself. I started playing Mystic Messenger one weekend when I didn’t have much else on. In the game’s plot, I was a young woman who stumbled upon a private messaging app. There I met a group of hyper-realistic anime characters with exaggerated eyes, slim, aquiline noses and jaws who were to be my new “friends”. The narrative of the game was that together we had to organize an upcoming charity event due to take place in 11 days. The gameplay of Mystic Messenger was unlike anything I had experienced. It did not involve collecting coins or moving through levels but chatting with these other characters through multiple-choice responses. While these characters were basically just interactive cartoon characters that would automatically respond to prompts from the player with pre-scripted answers, they still felt lifelike, and talking to them required tact and social nous. One character called Jumin liked it when I asked him about his pet cat. Another called Zen was a narcissist who only ever wanted compliments. Of all the characters in the game, I was most drawn to Jaehee, the only other woman in the group. She was the most intelligent and self-deprecating. I found her slightly sardonic attitude towards the other characters in the game funny. “It may not be fun chatting with me since I’m a woman,” she said ironically. “But I hope you do not avoid me too much.” Part of what made Mystic Messenger compelling was the fact that it ran in real time. This meant that once you started, if you stepped away from the game you would miss out on vital conversations and lose track of where you stood with your virtual friends. This social dynamic reminded me of being a teenager, when I’d come home from school and log on to MSN Messenger and sit there for hours and hours. For the first few days, I played Mystic Messenger conscientiously and tried to make sure that I responded to every one of Jaehee’s messages. I was on the app two to three hours per day, which felt like a lot. But compared with those I spoke to on forums, my commitment to the game and Jaehee was paltry. Amy, a single mum from South Africa who was part of the Mystic Messenger Addicts forum, told me that she played every day for at least six hours. Once she had successfully wooed one character, she would refresh the app and start again, focusing her attention on someone new. “That way I can fall in love with every character, get to know them all so intimately.” I asked her which of the characters she liked best so far. “That would have to be Zen,” she said. “He’s nice. Kind of like an ideal boyfriend, maybe. He knows what’s important to him. He’s into his career. He doesn’t make me feel inferior.” Natsuki, also a self-proclaimed “addict”, told me that she played for at least four hours a day and liked Jumin best. Wild Rose said that when the game first came out she would play for up to five hours a day but had since cut down. “If I could play more I would,” she said. “But I have a daughter to look after and I’m studying. This has meant many sleepless nights catching up.” When dating sims first became popular in Japan, they were often reported on by the media with a tone of moralizing disgust, partly because of the obsessive way fans played. These games were seen as an escape, a last resort for nerdy men who needed virtual girls to substitute for real, healthy heterosexual relationships. Along with anime and manga, dating sims were blamed for the low fertility rates in Japan, and the young men who played these games were sometimes described as “herbivores”, as if lacking in carnal desire. This attitude was shared by western media, too, where Japanese dating sims were seen as a curious, almost alien pathology. Following the widely reported story of Nene Anegasaki – the man who married his favorite character from the dating sim Love Plus – an article in the New York Times Magazine described these games as a last resort for men who needed virtual women as a “substitute for real, monogamous romance”. With the popularity of dating sims now growing outside Japan, similar concerns have once again emerged. In China, where a dating sim called Love and Producer was downloaded more than 7m times in its first month, media reports about the game have been mostly negative, if not alarmist. One Chinese commentator argued that the only reason young people were drawn to dating sims was because their real lives are “brutally lacking” in real love. “The simplicity, consumerism, and hypocrisy of romantic simulation games,” he wrote, “reflect the love-free disease that belongs to this era.” When I raised these criticisms with Wild Rose, she dismissed them as narrow and close-minded. She told me that playing Mystic Messenger had actually made her emotional life more stable and fulfilling. Mystic Messenger was a place where she could explore some of her unmet emotional needs, where it was safe to fantasize and imagine other ways of loving. “When I met Saeran my world changed,” she said. “I felt that he was talking to me and me alone. I felt interesting and needed.” In Japan, where this debate about intimacy with the virtual has been unfolding since the 1980s, there is a word that gives shape to the idea of loving a virtual non-human. That word is moe, which derives from the Japanese verb moeru, meaning to burst into bud. This word was originally used in ancient Japanese love poetry to describe nature blossoming into life. But within the dating sim and anime subcultures, it has come to describe the unique feeling of intimacy that one can feel for a virtual or fictional being. | |
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| 09-27-18 08:59pm - 2294 days | #1189 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
President Donald Trump, after listening to the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing, has deliberated long and hard. And he is forced to say he believes Kavanaugh is an honest, God-fearing man who belongs on the Supreme Court. This was both before and after hearing Ford's testimony. (The sound was turned off while Ford testified, because Trump did not want to listen to a slag female Democrat telling lies about Brett Kavanaugh, one of the finest, most honorable men the President has ever met. So Trump listened in silence while Ford testified. And Trump deliberated long and hard, to reach the truth: Democrats are slimy creatures from the depths of hell, who attack Trump again and again, with lies and fake news and terrible, hurtful things that Trump is forced to ignore. ----------------- ----------------- Donald Trump reacts to Blasey Ford-Kavanaugh hearing HuffPost US Andy Campbell Sep 27th 2018 7:10PM X President Donald Trump tweeted his support of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh Thursday after he testified in front the Senate Judiciary Committee to address Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that he sexually assaulted her. Thursday’s hearing is a critical moment for the Me Too movement, hinging on whether U.S. politicians believe women like Blasey and Kavanaugh’s other alleged victims, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick; whether allegations of sexual assault can or should affect a Supreme Court confirmation; whether speaking out against powerful men is worth the inevitable backlash. It was no surprise that Trump chimed in about the hearing. He’s publicly defended Kavanaugh and lashed out at Blasey since she went public with her allegation that Kavanaugh forced himself on her at a party in high school. In a Twitter tirade last week, Trump wondered why Blasey never called the cops (victims of rape and sexual assault rarely do) and why nobody reached out to the FBI (you’re not supposed to). He accused Democrats of playing a “con game” and making “false accusations.” He said Kavanaugh was “an absolute gem” who had been “treated very unfairly.” The president also argued that Ramirez “has nothing” against Kavanaugh because “She was totally messed up. She admits she was drunk.” Ramirez accused the nominee of thrusting his penis in her face when they were freshmen at Yale in the ’80s. Trump has said little about Swetnick, who stated in a sworn declaration prior to Thursday’s hearing that Kavanaugh and others in his circle would spike beverages at parties and “target” particular women in attendance. Swetnick said she was raped at a party where Kavanaugh was present. Trump’s swipes at Kavanaugh’s accusers demonstrate why many victims don’t share their stories of assault or seek help. Blasey’s closest friends have said she was hesitant to come forward with her story because she feared these very attacks. Despite being forced to spar with the president online and endure threats and harassment, Blasey announced on Sunday that she would indeed testify about her accusations against Kavanaugh. “We committed to moving forward with an open hearing,” wrote Blasey’s lawyers in a statement. “Despite actual threats to her safety and her life, Dr. Ford believes it is important for Senators to hear directly from her about the sexual assault committed against her.” This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 09-27-18 08:11pm - 2294 days | #1188 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST: But the incident, and that whole tense and silent year has forced Winter to think a lot about the nature of memory, especially during a time of intense emotional development and heavy drinking. “I have thought a lot about Kavanaugh’s statement on Fox, that he never drank so much that he didn’t remember what he had done the next morning. And having witnessed the level of drunkenness of Brett and his crew in that dorm, and the vomitous aftermath in the bathroom, I find that very hard to believe. I was not a blackout drinker, but there’s tons of stuff I don’t remember because I was drinking a lot, frequently. Anybody who drank a lot in college and can stand up 35 years later and say, ‘I am sure that did not happen’ inherently lacks credibility to me.” | |
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| 09-27-18 08:10pm - 2294 days | #1187 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Brett Kavanaugh’s Former Roommate Describes Their Debauched Dorm at Yale The Cut Lisa Miller,The Cut Wed, Sep 26 1:01 PM PDT In the fall of 1983, three weeks into his freshman year at Yale, Kit Winter switched dorm rooms. He had been sharing a room on the fourth floor of Lawrance Hall, entryway D, with a kid from Rhode Island named James Garman. But Garman was studious and Winter liked to stay up late, and they had heard about an unoccupied single in the basement. So they cooked up a scheme to tell the dean that they weren’t getting along, and Winter moved down to LD01, a three-man suite, where two rooms opened up onto a large living area. Winter took over the empty single. The double was already occupied. Jamie Roche, who has publicly supported Deborah Ramirez in her account of being sexually threatened by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, lived there. And so did Kavanaugh himself. Immediately Winter noted the cold, alienated dynamic in LD01; the place was profoundly inhospitable even by 1980s college standards. “It was a dungeon space,” recollects Garman, now an organic farmer. “It was dark and it was cellar-like, and it was thoroughly creepy.” And while on the first floor of entryway C, a group of guys had gotten together some furniture and a big-screen TV creating a gathering place for people who liked to watch sports, the living room down in LD01 remained entirely unfurnished except for an old keg — “and I think there was also a broken floor lamp much of the time,” Winter recalls. “And as you might expect in a sizable empty room, there were a lot of dust balls and Solo cups and trash on the floor. It was not an inviting space. It was pretty grim.” The environment was disturbing enough that Winter mentioned it to his high school friend Itamar Kubovy, who also ultimately went to Yale. “I remember Kit saying how uncomfortable it was, how creepy it was,” Kubovy recalls. [Editor’s note: Winter, Kubovy and I went to high school together in New Haven and Winter’s family and mine were friends.] Especially disgusting was the shared bathroom, which was always covered in vomit. Kavanaugh and his crowd, whom Winter characterizes as “loud, obnoxious frat boy–like drunks” were the hardest drinkers on campus even back then, when hard drinking did not hold the stigma it does today. In a statement earlier this week, Roche recalled Kavanaugh “frequently drinking excessively and becoming incoherently drunk,” and Winter corroborates that recollection. “There was a lot of vomit in the bathroom. No one ever cleaned it up. It was disgusting. It wasn’t incidental. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, this weekend someone puked in the bathroom.’ People were constantly puking in the bathroom. Constantly.” Lori Adams, a retired psychiatrist in Underhill, Vermont, was a friend of Winter’s at Yale. “I remember,” she says, “that you couldn’t use the bathroom because his roommates vomited all over the floor and didn’t clean it up.” (Winter clarifies that Roche wasn’t much of a drinker and that although he himself drank a fair amount during freshman year, he very rarely drank to the point of throwing up.) The social dynamic within the triple was non-existent to the point that Winter felt uncomfortable. From the start, Winter and Kavanaugh barely acknowledged one another’s existence. He remembers no conversation between them. Kubovy, still in high school at the time, sometimes visited Winter’s dorm room. “It’s weird never saying hello to one of your two roommates,” he says, in retrospect. (Several years later, Dana How lived next door to Kavanaugh and his recollection is similar. Kavanaugh and his roommates “didn’t talk to anybody,” How remembers. “They were completely antisocial. The door was closed. These guys were completely disconnected.”) In LDO1, Kavanaugh and Roche were also very nearly strangers, according to Roche’s statement. “Brett and I did not socialize beyond the first few days of freshman year.” (Roche moved out in December of that year.) Once in a while Winter and Roche would talk late at night, sitting on the floor in the double, “leaning with our backs against the beds,” Winter remembers. “For the last 35 years, if anybody had said, ‘Tell me about Jamie Roche,’ I would have said ‘Jamie Roche is the most stand-up guy you would ever hope to meet.’ Jamie stood out as centered, mature — more of a gentleman than the frat boys. He had nice manners.” Many of the residents of Lawrance Hall that year describe the social life on campus as extremely tribal and isolating, with the elites and legacies hanging with each other, dominating and creating ripples of inarticulate fear, while the outsiders — the nerds and the scholarship kids and the people of color — circled the outskirts seeking friendly alliances. The fraternity brothers at Delta Kappa Epsilon — to which Kavanaugh pledged — could be heard in the streets at night chanting. “There was always more than a strong whiff of sexual violence hanging over the Dekes all the time,” says Garman. Dana How recalls consciously deciding to stay away from one of Kavanaugh’s frat brothers — he can’t now remember the reason why. Another person, who arrived at Yale from a working-class background, remembers encountering the upper levels of the social hierarchy for the first time and understanding them as “dangerous.” “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be really careful around these people.’ I saw it through a class lens. I don’t want to be somebody’s little mouse. I don’t want to be somebody who gets eaten. Looking back, I perceived things as dangers rather than, ‘Oh, fuck. This is crazy.’ Back then, it was sort of a game where there had to be some way to play it where you weren’t a victim.” All of which may go some way to explaining why the atmosphere in LD01 was so silent and charged. Kit Winter is gay. He had come out to his parents the same year he entered Yale, and lived on his own on and off for months, including — during the summer before college — in New York City on the Lower East Side. He had multiple piercings in his ears and wore a motorcycle jacket and his hair in a punkish pouf. People remember him as visible and strong — “he wore his soul on his sleeve,” says someone who dated him at the time. So it is perhaps not too surprising that he and Kavanaugh, the jock from Georgetown Prep, failed to connect. “Jocks were often the anathema of gay people at Yale at the time,” says Adams. “They didn’t treat them well. I had gay friends who were stalked, followed home, their doors beaten in, things like that.” Winter adds that at that moment in his life, he was inclined toward isolation. He would eventually become student leader at Yale and, during the early years of the AIDS crisis, a visible gay activist. But as an 18-year-old freshman, he was still working things out, and disdainful of the sheltered, privileged people who dominated his environment. “I was out, but I was still a little alienated. I was not really a joiner, I don’t think. Yale was not a particularly gay-friendly environment, but I was also not a particularly friendly person. I looked alienated. I felt alienated. I drank a lot.” What is surprising, however, especially in light of today’s priority on hearing and empowering the voices of society’s underclasses, is the extent to which Winter and all the alienated kids who arrived on Yale’s Old Campus (where all the freshmen live) in the fall of 1983 regarded the social structures and their places in it as normal and expected. Winter felt that his own discomfort, the essential weirdness of his living situation, was barely worth mentioning. “At the time, my response to most stuff was to listen to more punk-rock music and to have a scotch. I felt very abandoned. You could have thrown rocks at me and I would have kept my head down and kept walking.” Winter did tell his friends about his living situation. “I remember that Kit was really unhappy with his roommates,” says Lori Adams. “They were jocks and Kit was an out gay man with peroxide blonde hair. He was uncomfortable there. And he didn’t spend much time there.” But he didn’t tell anyone with any authority to change things. Winter had already cashed a chit to move to the desired single, and he didn’t want to irritate the dean with complaints. Which is why Winter didn’t say anything when he came home one day that fall to find a dead pigeon nailed to his door — not on the front door of the suite, but on his own bedroom door. “It wasn’t rotten or anything. I assumed that someone found a dead bird on the ground,” he says. “I interpreted it as an act of social hostility slash terrorism. I thought it was a very clear message. We don’t like you, and we don’t want you here. I didn’t know who it was who didn’t want me here. I didn’t know who had done it.” Again, Winter didn’t tell authorities or administrators and he didn’t call the police. He didn’t try to figure out who had done it — though as someone who lived in Lawrance that year points out, it was done by someone with serious intent: “the doors were really dense wood. It would take some real hammering to get a pigeon nailed to that door.” Winter threw the bird away, and told a few friends, and the story circulated, as stories do. “I think my general response was, screw you. I’m not going anywhere,” he says. But what’s remarkable now is how little a dent it made in the memories of Winter’s friends or the other people in his dorm, as if such targeted attacks were just part of the every day. “I remember this moment of hostility around the bird,” says Kubovy, “but it’s all part of the blur.” By email Jamie Roche confirms that he also vaguely remembers the pigeon. | |
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| 09-27-18 07:58pm - 2294 days | #1186 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Senator Lindsey Graham does not believe Christine Ford. You have to use the rule of law. There is no hard evidence against Brett Kavanaugh. And Brett Kavanaugh has denied it. So, we don't need an investigation. The FBI should stay out of it. I believe Brett Kavanaugh. He is innocent. The people who betrayed Christine Ford are Democrats, who are using this as a political weapon against the Republican party. Senator Lindsy Graham is angry. The Democrats have abused Christine Ford, and, as Republicans, we support her. Because Republicans support women everywhere. Even slime-ball sluts who are Democrats. ----------- ----------- 'I feel ambushed': Lindsey Graham vents rage at Democrats and Christine Blasey Ford's lawyers after testimony Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., emerges from Christine Blasey Ford's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday feeling "really upset" toward his political opponents. The senator, an ally of President Donald Trump's, excoriated Democrats for "playing a political game" after the first round of the hearing, in which Ford testified that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her decades earlier. He suggested that Democrats were attempting to push Kavanaugh's nomination beyond the November midterm elections, where they have a chance of taking the majority away from the GOP. Kevin Breuninger | @KevinWilliamB Published 7 Hours Ago Updated 3 Hours Ago CNBC.com | |
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| 09-27-18 07:44pm - 2294 days | #1185 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
President Donald Trump has a problem with facts: He prefers his own facts, instead of facts that other people can find. For example, Trump says that soybean prices have gone up. But somehow, soybean prices are near decade lows. So how can price go up, when they are going down? Just ask Trump: he will tell you they are up, up, up. Just ignore that prices are down. -------- -------- Trump said soybean prices have gone up. They're near decade-lows. Business Insider Gina Heeb,Business Insider 9 hours ago President Donald Trump said soybean prices have gone up. They have fallen to near decade lows since his trade war with China began. China has turned to South American countries to replace US soybeans. Soybean stocks are approaching record levels. Watch soybeans trade in real time here. President Donald Trump claims US soybeans have largely held up against his trade war with China. But tariffs have pushed prices to lows not seen since 2008. "And soybeans are going up, and things are going up," he said at a press conference in New York on Wednesday. "And we've had very little hurt, from what I’ve done. In fact, the markets have gone up, and the farmers are going to do great." In reality, soybean prices have fallen more than 12% since China placed a 25% import tax on the legume to retaliate against the Trump administration. That country is the largest soybean customer in the world, accounting for more than half of global imports in 2017. "There's a lot of concern about the future," Gary Schnitkey, a farm management specialist and University of Illinois professor, said. "Because [soybean farmers] are going to see much lower prices as a result of tariffs." Also on Wednesday, Trump said China has started buying US soybeans again. But officials in Beijing have been strategizing to minimize reliance on US soybeans since the start of the trade war. China has swapped much of its demand to South America and away from the US, which is now seeing record levels of soybean inventories. "At this juncture of deepening trade tensions, it is unlikely that private traders in China would seek to buy US origin soybeans," JPMorgan analysts said in a recent research note. In July, the Trump administration unveiled $12 billion in emergency aid to farmers who risked suffering financial losses from its trade policies. Soybean farmers are poised to get a large portion of benefits from the controversial plan. "The soybean is not just some small thing in the background," Torsten Sløk, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank, said. "It's actually something that is pretty important overall for what the agriculture sector is doing and in terms of where revenue is coming from. That's why we're watching very carefully whether soybean prices go up or down." With no clear end ito the trade war in sight, analysts say there's little chance of soybean prices recovering anytime soon. Beijing cancelled high-level trade talks planned for this week after another round of Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports took effect. And the longer tariffs are in place, the more difficult regaining market share could be. "Even under a best-case scenario, ie, cease of the trade war, it will be difficult to fully recover the prior extent of China’s soybean import demand in our view," JPMorgan wrote. | |
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| 09-27-18 06:41pm - 2294 days | #1184 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Brett Kavanaugh: is he still a virgin? Who fathered his two daughters? Enquiring minds want to know. Kavanaugh has told the United States Senate that the confirmation process has become a national disgrace. He will not stand for it. Once installed at the Supreme Court, he will fight to keep politics clean from the dirty, scum-bag Democrats. This zeal is nothing new for Kavanaugh. In his earlier years, he fought to remove President Clinton from the White House. Kavanaugh personally urged Starr to expand the Whitewater investigation to include looking at the death of White House staffer Vince Foster, a controversy that was a partisan attempt to use a man’s death to go after the Clintons. Foster died by suicide in 1993, a conclusion reached by U.S. Park Police (his body was found in a park) and the FBI. In fact, multiple investigations concurred that it was a suicide. Yet in March 1995, after those reviews, Kavanaugh called for a “full-fledged investigation” into Foster’s death. That inquiry helped validate right-wing conspiracy theorists who believed that the Clintons killed Foster, and the matter outraged Foster’s family. During the Monica Lewinsky inquiry, Kavanaugh pressed Starr to ask Clinton sexually graphic questions about his relationship with the White House intern. ----- ----- Politics Man Who Pushed To Ask Bill Clinton Sexually Explicit Questions Bemoans Dirty Politics HuffPost Amanda Terkel,HuffPost 3 hours ago Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is battling sexual misconduct allegations. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh came out swinging on Thursday, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that his confirmation process had become a “national disgrace” and bemoaning the partisan politics around it. “The Constitution gives the Senate an important role in the confirmation process, but you have replaced advice and consent with search and destroy,” he said angrily in his opening remarks. “Since my nomination in July, there has been a frenzy on the left to come up with something, anything to block my confirmation.” The dirty politics Kavanaugh is alleging should be no surprise to him, since he spent part of his career in that world. Kavanaugh cut his teeth in Washington working for what Democrats consider to be the most brazen and partisan crusade in modern politics: Ken Starr’s investigations into President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. He spent more than three years working for the independent counsel, who was looking into various scandals surrounding Clinton and his wife, Hillary. Kavanaugh personally urged Starr to expand the Whitewater investigation to include looking at the death of White House staffer Vince Foster, a controversy that was a partisan attempt to use a man’s death to go after the Clintons. Foster died by suicide in 1993, a conclusion reached by U.S. Park Police (his body was found in a park) and the FBI. In fact, multiple investigations concurred that it was a suicide. Yet in March 1995, after those reviews, Kavanaugh called for a “full-fledged investigation” into Foster’s death. That inquiry helped validate right-wing conspiracy theorists who believed that the Clintons killed Foster, and the matter outraged Foster’s family. During the Monica Lewinsky inquiry, Kavanaugh pressed Starr to ask Clinton sexually graphic questions about his relationship with the White House intern. Some examples: (Look on the internet for examples of the salacious questions Kavanaugh wanted Clinton to answer: this from a guy who claims he is a family man with strong family values: asking explicit sex questions of the President of the United States, in an effort to expose the President to public shame). Yet on Thursday, Kavanaugh said he was shocked that he had to talk about his sex life. “As to sex, this is not a topic I ever imagined would come up at a judicial confirmation hearing,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before Kavanaugh on Thursday, has accused the Supreme Court nominee of sexually assaulting her while they were teenagers. Kavanaugh portrayed himself as a victim of a vast left-wing conspiracy, consisting of people who are working on behalf of the Clintons. “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record,” he claimed. “Revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. This is a circus.” He added that he believed the “grotesque and coordinated character assassination will dissuade confident and good people of all political persuasions from serving our country, and, as we all know in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.” Kavanaugh is currently a judge on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is widely considered the second-most powerful court in the country. Whether he stays there or goes onto the Supreme Court, he will have to rule on cases that involve Democrats and liberal groups ― the same ones he believes have ruined his life. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 09-27-18 05:53pm - 2294 days | #1183 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
On second thought, maybe Brett Kavanaugh should step down, and allow his 10-year-old daughter to fill the seat on the Supreme Court. After all, his 10-year-old daughter, little Liza, has the compassion to pray for Christine Ford. So Liza might have the compassion to let women have the right to an abortion. And maybe to let workers have the right to a union. And to maybe allow workers some rights in their fights with big business. And maybe she will care for environmental issues, unlike the Trump administration, which favors big business rights to rape the earth and pollute the environment. Maybe this is where Kavanaugh learned about the joys of rape: from trying to rape young women as a teenager, to today's stance of allowing big business to rape the environment. Rape is good: it feels good, and it's good for the economy.  | |
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| 09-27-18 05:42pm - 2294 days | #1182 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Republicans are hurt and angry that people, mainly scum-bag Democrats, are questioning Brett Kavanaugh. Brett is one of the finest men we've ever known. He is almost a saint. Remember, Brett has said he was a virgin throughout his high school years. And even after graduating from high school, he still remained a virgin for years afterwards. So how can these lying, scum-sucking women accuse our dear Brett of hateful sex crimes, where he tried to rape a woman, and exposed his penis (which is almost a holy relic, since he never used it for sex, but only to pee) to another woman? God himself will come down to earth, and stand with the Republican party, to throw these shameful, sinful Democrats into the fires of Hell. Come, let us worship in the House of Our Lord, and pray that Hellfire will cleanse these sinful Democrats from the Earth, that we may live in peace and harmony. Amen. A new prayer: Brett Kavanaugh is one tough Irishman. He is using his father, his wife, his two daughters to show his character, and tearfully tell how his 10-year-old daughter is praying for Christine Ford, the woman who has accused Brett of attempted rape. What an emotional story. This reminds me of Richard Nixon's Checkers speech, where Nixon stated he would keep the dog named Checkers for his children, and swayed public opinion in his favor, and away from any charges of political corruption. During the speech on national television, Nixon's wife and two daughters were featured prominently (showing Nixon was a fine family man). In the speech, Nixon: 'Defending himself as a man of the people, Nixon stressed his wife's abilities as a stenographer,[7] then said, "I should say this, that Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything."[27][28]' Proving that Nixon lived modestly, his wife lived modestly (no mink coats for Pat Nixon), and Nixon was one of the finest, common people alive (when common people were respected, unlike the days of Donald Trump, when the billionaires are respected). -------- -------- The Cut Unsurprisingly, Brett Kavanaugh’s Testimony Sounded Pretty Good to a Lot of People The Cut Kelly Conaboy,The Cut 2 hours 47 minutes ago After Dr. Christine Blasey Ford recounted the chilling details of her assault to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh appeared before the committee to give his testimony. He spoke of his father, football, and beer; he cried and he yelled for himself and in the name of his daughters. He was emotional and angry. To some, he was convincing. While one might hope Ford’s decision to upend her life to tell her story might convince those who previously supported Kavanaugh that he is unfit to sit on the Supreme Court — and that to at once believe her and believe him would be seen as impossible — for many this is not the case. For the sake of emotional preparedness, here are a few words from those who Kavanaugh continues to convince: ----------- The Wrap Brett Kavanaugh Breaks Down as He Mentions His Daughter, Father (Video) The Wrap Itay Hod,The Wrap 4 hours ago Brett Kavanaugh Breaks Down as He Mentions His Daughter, Father (Video) A usually stoic Brett Kavanaugh choked up in tears as he described how his young daughter, Liza, asked her mother Ashley Kavanaugh to pray for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused the Supreme Court nominee of sexually assaulting her in the early 1980s. “The other night, Ashley and my daughter, Liza, said their prayers,” Kavanaugh said in his opening statement to the committee. “And little Liza, all of 10-years-old, said to Ashley, ‘We should pray for the woman.'” Kavanaugh, who began his statement in a defiant tone, began crying as he tried got compose himself. “It’s a lot of wisdom from a 10-year-old.” After regaining his composure, Kavanaugh tried to go on with his statement. But his emotions took over as he again was forced to take a break. “We mean no ill will,” he said before drawing a long sigh. Kavanaugh broke down again when he mentioned his father. “Why did I keep calendars?” he asked, referring to detailed calendars he submitted to the committee. “My dad started keeping detailed calendars of his life in 1978.” An emotional Kavanaugh then stopped. “He did so as both a calendar and a diary,” he said, as his voice cracked. “He’s a very organized guy, to put it mildly.” Earlier in the day, Dr. Ford gave her own emotional testimony to the committee, choking back her own tears as she recalled the time when she said Judge Kavanaugh tried to rape her while he was drunk at a party during the early 1980s. “Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes. He had a hard time because he was so drunk,” Ford told senators in her opening statement. “I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from screaming. This was what terrified me the most,” she said. As she recounted the most specific details, Ford became visibly emotional and choked up on several occasions. “It was hard for me to breathe,” she continued, saying that Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge was also in the room egging him on. “I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me. Both Brett and Mark were drunkenly laughing during the attack,” Ford said. Also Read: All Top 10 US Twitter Trends Right Now Are About #KavanaughHearings Kavanaugh has categorically denied Ford’s accusations. Judge has also disputed Ford’s account, though the Judiciary Committee has so far declined to call him to testify under oath — as Ford has requested. Ford is one of three women who have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. Another women, Deborah Ramirez, told The New Yorker on Sunday that Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face against her will while they were both drunk during their freshman year at Yale. Brett Kavanaugh gets emotional and breaks down in tears as he mentions his father: "Why did I keep calendars? My dad started keeping detailed calendars of his life in 1978." "In 9th grade, in 1980, I started keeping calendars of my own" — ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) September 27, 2018 | |
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| 09-27-18 12:31pm - 2295 days | #10 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
@biker, I'm not sure why, but I always liked the image and costume of Ming the Merciless. Even more than Superman or Batman or the other superheroes. Maybe because he was a unique supervillain, who thoroughly enjoyed the powers he had and his dominion over all the people. He just seems like the ultimate badass. I don't remember any paperback comics, although he was featured in a newspaper strip along with Flash Gordon. Most of the comics I read were Superman and Batman. I just like your avatar: supercool. I have fond memories of the way Lynda Carter filled out her Wonder Woman costume. Much more so than Gail Gadot. Although I thought the newest Wonder Woman film was one of the best comic book movies of the last few years. | |
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| 09-27-18 07:44am - 2295 days | #1181 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Stories from the Twilight Zone: Republicans are firing birdshot over the Christine Ford accusations against Brett Kavanaugh. Senator Orrin Hatch, that distinguished Republican who is an expert at smearing people the Republican party wants to discredit, has said Christine Ford was mistaken when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault: it wasn't Brett Kavanaugh, it was someone else, Orrin Hatch says. Now, the Republicans have found two unidentified men who claim they were the ones who tried to rape Christine Ford. Since the statue of limitations has passed on the attempted rape, the two men are free of that charge. But they could be tried for perjury, if it could be proved the two men were hired by Republicans to muddy the waters with their lies. To be tried for perjury, they would have to lie under oath. Few details about the claims have been released: the men are not named. But here we have what appears to be a professional cover-up like you can read in a spy novel: the Washington swamp in real life. The next stage would be if Aliens from the Planet Zasurus would testify to the Republican panel about their attempt to rape Christine Ford: since the aliens are extra-terrestrial, the Republican party is willing to grant them immunity from prosecution, since they were ignorant of US laws regarding consent for sexual relations. All of these investigations, are an attempt by the Republican party, to give a fair and unbiased report on Brett Kavanaugh, a fine, upstanding Republican of the highest moral order. Kavanaugh was an athletic hero in high school, who remained a virgin in high school, and for years after high school, even though Kavanaugh might have tasted liquor more than he should have during his virgin years, but liquor is not against the law, and it's different from attempted rape and sexual intercourse with women who are drugged and/or drunk. Anyway, we can ignore whatever Christine Ford says, and any other women who accuses Brett Kavanaugh of sexual advances without consent, because Donald Trump, and many other fine Republicans, have said that Kavanaugh is an American hero who deserves a seat on the Supreme Court. ---------- ---------- Kavanaugh allegations 2 unidentified men claim they may have assaulted Christine Blasey Ford in 1982, not Kavanaugh 7:13 a.m. ET Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images On Wednesday night, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a timeline detailing how Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and his staff have responded to allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The document indicates, among other things, that committee staff interviewed two men who claim that they, not Kavanugh, may have had the 1982 "encounter" with Christine Blasey Ford that she calls a rape attempt by Kavanaugh. The men are not named and few details are provided. On Monday, Sept. 24, Judiciary Committee staff interviewed "a man who believes he, not Judge Kavanaugh, had the encounter with Dr. Ford in 1982 that is the basis of his complaint," the timeline says. In an interview with staffers on Tuesday, the man "described his recollection of their interaction in some detail," and on Wednesday, he submitted "a more in-depth written statement," the committee said. Also on Wednesday, committee staff spoke by phone "with another man who believes he, not Judge Kavanuagh, had the encounter with Dr. Ford in 1982 that is the basis of her allegation. He explained his recollection of the details of the encounter." "The previously unknown interviews could add a new layer to the evolving saga on the eve of a possible explosive hearing between Kavanaugh and Ford, though it's unknown whether the men's claims are being taken seriously," USA Today says. "The committee didn't identify the men, offer details about what they said, state whether committee staff found their accounts credible, or indicate whether there would be any further follow-up," BuzzFeed News adds. The mistaken-identity explanation was seen as a deus ex machina for Kavanaugh before two other accusers emerged this week, but if there's any there there, the Republican prosecutor hired to question Ford will likely bring it up at Thursday's hearing. | |
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| 09-27-18 06:30am - 2295 days | #1179 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
@jook, Thanks for the congrats. Seems like I'm spending more time reading the news about Trump and his antics than I am on porn. I've never paid much attention to politics. But reading about Trump, it teaches me that, even though I knew I never really understood human behavior, that I am more clueless than I ever thought. I never understood how Trump won the election. I thought that making statements that Mexicans were rapists, boasting about grabbing women by the pussy, and his constant lies and insults would have kept him from office. But I have to realize that most people think different from me, have different values, different beliefs. Not a bad thing, entirely. But for a mom to tell her 2 teen daughters that groping is normal, and that even if Brett Kavanaugh did try to rape a women and exposed himself to a different woman at a party, that it doesn't matter, that Kavanaugh is still a fine choice for the Supreme Court, in spite of his lies and denials and perjured testimony: so the woman realizes that people can have flaws, and she is still a fan of Kavanaugh, and wants him on the Supreme Court, the highest position a judge can have, interpreting the laws that we live by. Hypocrisy is real, the woman implies, and we should accept it. But to say that a hypocrite should be on the Supreme Court because he's against abortion, against unions, against the rights of workers, pro big business--maybe the woman is just focusing on abortion, and ignoring the rest of Kavanaugh's positions. People are more complicated than I can understand. | |
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]| 09-26-18 04:04pm - 2296 days | #1177 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The new morality under Trump. Trump supporter tells daughters groping is no big deal. This is a woman and mother who wants her daughters to live in the real world, to realize that not everything is sugar and spice and everything nice. So she tells her daughters, on live TV, that lots of guys grope women. So deal with it. Don't make a fuss. And the woman goes on to say, that even if the attempted rape and molestation charges against Brett Kavanaugh are true, it makes no difference: Kavanaugh is a wonderful man, and deserves to be on the Supreme Court, fighting against the evil law that allows women to have abortions. Spoken like a true Republican, who is not afraid to admit the truth. Unlike the hypocrite Senate Republicans, who preach fairness while trying to bury Kavanaugh's accusers in a pile of lies and shit. -------------- -------------- Politics Trump Supporter Tells Daughters Groping 'Is No Big Deal' Live On MSNBC HuffPost David Moye,HuffPost 1 hour 47 minutes ago As Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh deals with a growing number of sexual As Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh deals with a growing number of sexual misconduct allegations, some parents are using the situation to teach valuable life lessons. Hopefully, not too many want to impart the lesson being taught by a mother in Bozeman, Montana: Groping is no big deal. The unidentified woman made a point of telling her two teen daughters this during a live interview Tuesday on MSNBC. “Groping a woman? At 18?” she said, before asking her daughters, “I mean, how many guys do you know who think that’s no big deal?” After the two girls nodded in agreement, the mother reiterated, “It’s not a big deal.” The woman insisted that even if the assault allegations against Kavanaugh are true, it “doesn’t take away from his character and his job to do what he needs to do as a Supreme Court nominee.” She added, “If he was pro-abortion, the liberals wouldn’t be fighting this hard.” As you might have predicted, many Twitter users didn’t agree with her beliefs about groping. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Edited on Sep 27, 2018, 06:11am | |
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| 09-26-18 03:53pm - 2296 days | #1176 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Real news: In his newest and strongest move to drain the swamp in Washington, President Donald Trump will make a surprise appearance at the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh. There, President Trump will declare a state of national emergency, and declare martial law, as the only way to maintain stability. The secret service agents, in a show of solidarity, will draw their weapons, including the highly specialized FN P90 submachine gun, which will spray the room to neutralize scumbag Democrats and traitorous Republicans. Brett Kavanaugh stands firm, defending his integrity and honor, and will use his manhood against the hail of lethal bullets that will be unleashed by the secret service. Hopefully, his wife will also survive the firestorm of lethal bullets. But if Brett Kavanaugh's wife dies in the firefight, she will be given a hero's funeral. And Brett Kavanaugh will then be free to choose the next female recipient of his powerful manhood. Nominations are now taking place, for the honor to fill Brett Kavanaugh's empty bed (technically, not empty, until his current wife is dead, but in a deadly hail of bullets, her chances of surviving may not be good.) | |
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| 09-26-18 03:17pm - 2296 days | #1175 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Real news: President Donald Trump has asked his best pal, Vladimir Putin, to loan him a few good men from the Russian's hitman academy. Trump has been bothered by liars and traitors inside his administration. And Trump has pledged to drain the swamp in Washington. Having Putin's trained assassins remove Mueller, Sessions, and a few other enemies of Trump would allow Trump to put his plans to make America great again on the fast track. Trump, leader of the Moral Majority for a White America. Putin, leader of the third greatest nation on earth, after American and China. And North Korea's leader, aiming to follow Trump and Putin to the path of great nations on earth. Hail, to the conquering heroes! --------- --------- World Skripal 'hitman' unmasked as GRU colonel awarded Russia's highest military honour by Vladimir Putin The Telegraph Hayley Dixon,The Telegraph 41 minutes ago The real identity of wanted man Ruslan Boshirov can be disclosed as Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga One of the trained assassins wanted for poisoning Sergei Skripal is a decorated colonel in Russian military intelligence given the country’s highest award by Vladimir Putin. The real identity of one of the wanted men in the nerve agent attack - named by counter-terrorism police as Ruslan Boshirov - can be disclosed as Colonel Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga. The 39-year-old, who has served in wars in Chechnya and Ukraine, was made a Hero of the Russian Federation by decree of the President in 2014 in a ceremony shrouded in secrecy. The disclosure, uncovered by investigative journalist organisation Bellingcat in conjunction with The Telegraph, exposes as lies Mr Putin’s claims that the Skripals' would-be killers were innocent "civilians". Chepiga, posing as Boshirov, and a second man identified as Alexander Petrov, have insisted they were on holiday in Salisbury and had no connection with the attack, using weapons-grade Novichok nerve agent. Video: Salisbury poison suspects claim they were tourists The true identity of his accomplice Alexander Petrov remains unclear, but The Telegraph has established that he was travelling under his real first name and had only changed his surname to an alias. Counter-terrorism police and the security services are understood to know his real name. A former senior Russian military officer said Col Chepiga’s high rank and experience strongly suggested that “the job was ordered at the highest level”. The source claimed an attempted assassination of less importance would have been carried out by a lower ranking officer. A Tory minister said: “This is further embarrassment for Putin and Russia. This is the latest in a series of cock-ups by the GRU. It will have the opposite effect he will have wanted. It shows an inept capability that has been exposed. “There is no doubt that the Salisbury poisoning was part of a wider plan of Putin reaffirming Russia as a superpower and letting people know what Russia is capable of. This was a message to the West and his own people - cross me and there are consequences. “He has learned that he simply won’t get away with it.” Boris Johnson, the former Foreign Secretary, said: "Utterly predictable news that GRU behind Skripal atrocity. What have you got to say, Putin? And I hope we hear real condemnation from Corbyn." GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga (back row, far right) Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga - aka Ruslan Boshirov - is believed to be pictured back row, far right with a group of fellow military graduates in Chechnya The revelations come as Theresa May told the UN's security council that Russia should not "be in any doubt" that if it did not "rejoin the international consensus against the use of chemical weapons" then the UK and its allies would be forced to take action. European arrest warrants and Interpol red notices have been issued for the pair, who are accused of the murder of Dawn Sturgess, a local woman inadvertently poisoned by a discarded Novichok bottle, and the attempted murder of Col Skripal, 67, and his daughter Yulia, 33. Both men - under the aliases Boshirov and Petrov - have been charged with the poisoning of the Skripals by the Crown Prosecution Service. After Scotland Yard released its evidence - including CCTV showing the men close to Col Skripal's home on the day he was poisoned - the pair appeared on Russia TV, on the order of Mr Putin, to claim that they worked in the fitness industry and their sole reason for visiting the UK was to see the historic sites of “wonderful” Salisbury. Theresa May had publicly accused them of being members of the GRU. It can now be revealed that Col Chepiga has been fighting in an elite special forces unit - Spetsnaz - under the command of the GRU for 17 years and working undercover for at least nine years. He has been given more than 20 awards and a Hero of the Russian Federation medal, though, unlike most of the other recipients, there is little public information available about Col Chepiga. The medals are normally awarded by the president personally, and are only given to a handful of people each year. The website of the Far-Eastern Military Command Academy, where Col Chepiga studied, lists all of their alumni who have received the award with a detailed description of the acts that resulted in the recognition. In his case it simply says: “Anatoly Vladimirovich Chepiga was awarded the honourary title of Hero of the Russian Federation by order of the president of the Russian Federation.” His name also appears on a monument in honour of the alumni of the Far-Eastern Military Command who have received their Hero medal at its base on the border with China. The secretive nature of Col Chepiga’s award, combined with the timing in 2014, suggests that it was for actions in Ukraine. In 2014 Russia was not engaged in fighting in either Chechnya or Syria and his unit - number 74854 of the 14th Separate Brigade of Special Forces (Spetsnaz) - was pictured on the eastern border of Ukraine that year. Involvement in Ukraine would explain the secrecy around his award, which is also noted by a veterans' group. The group writes on its website: “You can become a hero even in our seemingly peaceful times." “Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga, a native of the village of Nikolayevka and 2001 graduate of the Far-Eastern Military Command Academy, was deployed to Chechnya three times and has more than 20 awards and medals. “In December 2014, Colonel Chepiga was awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation for carrying out a peacekeeping mission.” Col Chepiga was born in a small village with 300 residents near the border with China in 1979. At the age of 18, he enrolled in the Far-Eastern Military Command Academy in Blageoveschensk, less than an hour from his home. The academy is an elite training ground for marine commandos and officers in the Spetsnaz. At the time Col Chepiga was a student, it was known for training officers involved in overseas clandestine operations. He graduated in 2001 and joined his unit. He served with it in Chechnya where he was deployed three times. Bellingcat and the Insider Russia have uncovered a file from 2003 in which Col Chepiga applies for a passport in his real name that lists his address as the military unit in Khabarovsk. The soldier, who is married with a teenage son, then moved to Moscow, where he can next be traced in 2012. Experts believe that because of his rank as colonel, the same as Col Skripal, and the nature of his work he may have studied at the Military Diplomatic Academy, also known as the “GRU Conservatory”, following his move to Moscow. Passport records show that he was given the alias Ruslan Boshirov in 2009 at the latest. | |
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| 09-26-18 03:04pm - 2296 days | #1174 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The loyalty of a good woman. This woman shows how women can be loyal to their husbands and boyfriends. It shows how Brett Kavanaugh's wife can support her husband in the face of sexual molestation accusations. Stand by your man. And Brett's wife is standing by her man, even after numerous women have accused Brett of inappropriate sexual acts. "I love my husband. And support him totally. I will not believe he tried to molest or rape any woman, until I see him perform such acts directly in front of me." So, until Brett Kavanaugh unleashes his horny side in front of his wife, either with one of his daughters or some strange woman, Brett has one loyal wife behind him. But if Brett gets one of his daughters pregnant, or gets a couple dozen other females pregnant, then Brett's wife might give the matter another thought. The emotional and psychological toll has been heavy for both Brett Kavanaugh and his wife, after hearing women describe stories of Brett molesting other women. However, there is a silver lining in this: Brett has pledged that from now on, he will only molest his wife, and try not to molest his daughters, or be caught with illegal porn on his computers. And since he is a judge, he will yell stop! Stay away from my computers, to any law enforcement agencies that do not have a legal warrant to search. Brett Kavanaugh, proud to serve and to protect the legal rights of adulterers and fornicators and would-be rapists in the USA. ------ ------ Woman pleads guilty to letting boyfriend molest daughter Associated Press Associated Press 1 hour 20 minutes ago MARION, Ind. (AP) — A northeastern Indiana woman has admitted to charges that she allowed her boyfriend to molest her daughter, leaving the child pregnant at age 10. The 33-year-old Marion woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges of neglect, aiding child molesting and assisting a criminal. She agreed to accept a sentence of 20 years in prison and five years of probation. The woman admitted during Tuesday's hearing that her daughter told her that the boyfriend, 34-year-old Nicholas Deon Thrash, was molesting her, yet continued to let him live with them, the Chronicle Tribune reported. The woman did not report the molestation or her daughter's pregnancy to authorities. Thrash was sentenced last week to 160 years in prison after being convicted of 10 counts of child molesting. The woman agreed to have no contact with her now 12-year-old daughter until the girl's counselor "deems it appropriate." The Associated Press is not naming the woman to protect the identity of the girl. Deputy Grant County Prosecutor Lisa Glancy said she was glad for the sake of the victim that the woman pleaded guilty instead of taking it to trial. "We were certainly ready to go to trial in a few weeks, but the emotional and psychological toll would have been significantly more (for this trial) than the Thrash trial," Glancy said. The girl testified against Thrash, saying he molested her at least 15 times. Glancy said it likely would have been difficult for the victim to testify against her mother. The victim is currently in foster care, and the son she gave birth to in 2017 was given up for adoption. "She's doing better. That's all that we can hope for right now. She's at a really good place," Glancy said. ___ | |
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| 09-26-18 11:37am - 2296 days | #1173 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
President Trump and his fellow Republicans do not deny that Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, was a virgin in high school and for many years thereafter. Trump was also a virgin for many years. It's possible that Trump's children were either fathered by other men, or by God himself. Therefore, Trump could have a sexual relation with any of his children, since he is not the biological father of his children. And Trump has always said he has a yen for Ivanka, so maybe Trump can divorce his current wife and have a fling with Ivanka. Remember, Woody Allen broke up with Mia Farrow and married his stepdaughter, Soon-Yi. Soon-yi was adopted by Mia Farrow, I'm not sure if Woody Allen legally adopted Soon-Yi, but he did marry Soon-Yi legally. So, if Ivanka was fathered by some other man than Donald Trump, either because Donald Trump is sterile, or for some other reason, then maybe Donald Trump can go ahead and marry Ivanka. The fact that Ivanka is married, with children of her own, need not stand in the way of true love. Donald Trump has enough money to pay his current wife off (since he almost certainly has a pre-nup agreement with her), and live happily ever after with Ivanka. These thought are protected by the right of free speech. Trump himself has said that whatever he says or tweets is protected by free speech, since that is a God-given right of all Americans everywhere. And if people become aware of his tweets, no matter how ugly or mean the tweets are, they benefit the victim of the tweets because they raise public awareness of the tweets targets, which is a good thing. ----------- ----------- Julie Swetnick Accuses Brett Kavanaugh Of Sexual Misconduct, Alleges He Was Present During 'Gang Rape' HuffPost Nick Visser,HuffPost 3 hours ago Michael Avenatti said Wednesday that Julie Swetnick is his client accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, marking the third woman to come forward with claims against the Supreme Court nominee in just over a week. In a sworn declaration, Swetnick — a Washington, D.C., resident — said she was a “victim of one of these ‘gang’ or ‘train’ rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present” at a party in D.C. in approximately 1982. “During the incident, I was incapacitated without my consent and unable to fight off the boys raping me,” she wrote, noting that she shared what happened with “at least two other people” shortly after the incident. “I believe I was drugged using Quaaludes or something similar placed in what I was drinking.” Swetnick said she first met Kavanaugh and Judge, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s who came to the nominee’s defense, around 1980 or 1981. She described the two as “extremely close friends” who were “joined at the hip.” She said she attended “well over ten house parties” from 1981 to 1983. Between 1981 and 1982, she said at these parties she began to notice Judge, Kavanaugh and others would attempt to “‘spike’ the ‘punch’ at house parties I attended with drugs and/or grain alcohol so as to cause girls to lose their inhibitions and their ability to say ‘No.’” Kavanaugh and Judge, she said, would “‘target’ particular girls … it was usually a girl that was especially vulnerable because she was alone at the party or shy.” She said she has a “firm recollection” of seeing boys ― including Judge and Kavanaugh ― “lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room.” HuffPost has not independently corroborated these claims. The White House released a statement from Kavanaugh in response to the claims. “This is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone,” the statement said. “I don’t know who this is and this never happened.” Trump also responded to the claims Wednesday, calling Avenatti a “total low-life” who is “just looking for attention.” Avenatti, who also represents the adult film star Stormy Daniels, first said in a tweet Sunday that he had a new client with “credible information” regarding Kavanaugh and Judge. The newest allegation comes days after Deborah Ramirez, in an interview with The New Yorker that was published Sunday, claimed Kavanaugh exposed himself to her and thrust his penis in her face during a party when they were both students at Yale University in the 1980s. Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the claims. In an interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum on Monday, Kavanaugh denied the sexual assault allegations against him and said he was not going “to let false accusations drive us out of this process.” “We’re talking about allegations of sexual assault. I have never sexually assaulted anyone,” Kavanaugh told Fox News. “I did not have sexual intercourse, or anything close to sexual intercourse, in high school or many years thereafter.” Avenatti has repeatedly called for Kavanaugh’s nomination to be withdrawn. “We don’t need to be putting someone like that on Supreme Court for life,” he said during remarks at a launch party for newly formed political action committee “OMG WTF” last week in Los Angeles. The lawyer also told Chris Cuomo earlier this month that there are “other individuals that are more qualified than this judge to sit on the Supreme Court and his [Kavanaugh’s] nomination should be pulled.” Avenatti has made a name for himself as Daniels’ lawyer. He has not ruled out a potential presidential run in 2020, making appearances at the Iowa State Fair and a Democratic Party picnic in New Hampshire earlier this year. The White House has remained steadfast in its support of Kavanaugh, and on Sunday, officials said the latest allegations were part of a “coordinated smear campaign.” Hayley Miller contributed to this report. This article has been updated with Kavanaugh’s statement and Trump’s response. Clarification: A previous version of this article and an alert sent out referred to a sworn affidavit. It is a sworn declaration. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 09-25-18 09:02pm - 2296 days | #1172 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
United States Republicans searched their files, found that Miss Ukraine was a divorced mother with a child, and stripped her of her crown. Republicans, stand proud, because we can't have a Miss who was divorced. Not only divorced, but she has a child. Only unmarried women of good breeding are fit to wear a crown. ------ ------ Miss Ukraine is stripped of her crown after pageant officials discover she's a divorced mother Yahoo Lifestyle Kerry Justich,Yahoo Lifestyle 11 hours ago Miss Ukraine 2018 was disqualified days after getting crowned. (Photo: veronika_didusenko via Instagram) A new Miss Ukraine was crowned on Thursday in the country’s capital city of Kiev. But the celebratory beauty pageant that concluded with Veronika Didusenko winning the title and wearing the prized sash and crown has taken quite a turn. Pageant officials have stripped her of her title for lying about her personal life on her application. The 23-year-old, who was commemorating her big win on social media is now thanking followers for their support after the organizing committee announced her disqualification on Monday. According to the statement from the official Miss Ukraine organization, Didusenko was in direct violation of the contest’s rules when she applied to compete, as Didusenko had previously been married and had a child. The Organizing Committee of Miss Ukraine 2018 released a statement regarding disqualification of Veronika Didiusenko, who had won the title. (Credit: The Organizing Committee of the National Beauty Contest “Miss Ukraine”) “In accordance with the Rules for conducting the National Beauty Contest Miss Ukraine, a person who wishes to take part in the National Beauty Contest “Miss Ukraine” must comply, among other things, with the following requirements (valid for the period of the Contest): – not / was not married; – has no children,” the statement reads. “The same requirements are indicated in the official form (OFFICIAL ENTRY FORM), which is contained in the unified rules and conditions of participation in Miss World contest 2018.” Didusenko, who works primarily with children as part of the Young Einsteins organization in Ukraine, allegedly did not disclose the truth in her paperwork and omitted information about her 4-year-old son, who is absent from her social media accounts. However, some of her supporters think this shouldn’t be a reason to take away her title. “I do not think that the child and the family should be an obstacle to their dream,” one person commented on Didusenko’s Instagram account. While another wrote, “It’s time to change the rules.” But still, there are others who argue that a rule is a rule, and that Didusenko had no business breaking it. “The rules are the same for all, and Ukraine did not come up with them, but the founders of this world competition.” Now, Miss Ukraine officials have yet to decide which contestamt will fill her position to compete in Miss Universe. The competition’s jury plans to announce a new Miss Ukraine 2018 on Sept. 30 in a television broadcast, according to a statement. In Didusenko’s most recent Instagram post, the model thanks fans for their “sincere support at such a difficult time,” and even acknowledges her growing following since the controversy. Now, with over 11,000 followers, Didusenko could have a future as a social media influencer despite losing her crown. | |
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| 09-25-18 08:27pm - 2296 days | #1171 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Christine Ford will be questioned by a female assistant who has been hired by the Republican party. This is wrong. The correct way to questions Christine Ford is by the tried and true method of questioning witches: Do you worship the devil? Do you worship nature? Do you put spells on people? Do you dance naked under the moon? What does your pentacle mean? Is it an evil symbol? Do you sacrifice animals? Then, after asking these questions: bind her arms and legs, and throw her in a river. If she floats, she is proved to be a witch. If, instead, she drowns, then say a prayer for her soul, and ask God to forgive her sins. For Christine Ford is an evil woman, who questions the holiness of a Republican judge. And it's only right that she will be questioned by a mystery assistant, who is female, because it takes a female to unmask the evil of another female. --------- --------- Mitch McConnell describes attorney questioning Kavanaugh and his accuser a 'female assistant' Yahoo Lifestyle Elise Solé,Yahoo Lifestyle 3 hours ago Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described the attorney who will question Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser Christine Blasey Ford as a “female assistant.” McConnell made the comment on Tuesday while speaking to reporters about the potential outcome of Kavanaugh’s upcoming hearing during which he’ll face allegations of sexually assaulting professor Ford when the two were in high school (Kavanaugh has denied the claims). “We’re going to be moving forward. I’m confident we’re going to win, confident that he’ll be confirmed in the very near future. I believe he’ll be confirmed, yes,” said McConnell, according to Reuters. “We have hired a female assistant to go on staff and to ask these questions in a respectful and professional way,” referring to the attorney (whose name is being kept private) hired by the male panel of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee who will question both Kavanaugh and Ford during Thursday’s hearing. According to CNBC, Kavanaugh and Ford will be also questioned by the committee’s four Democratic senators, one of which is California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the recipient of the private letter written by Ford that initially aired the allegations. The “female assistant” narrative didn’t exactly go over well. The secrecy surrounding the identity of the lawyer has furthered tensions. “Who is going to speak for all of the 11 Republican senators?” Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois told CNN. “We don’t have the name, do we? Someone has been given a new job — a person we don’t know. At some point that secrecy has to be unveiled. We should at least know who is going to take the place of the 11 duly elected senators.” Last week, CNN reported that “multiple sources” claimed the role would be filled by Beth Wilkinson, a former attorney for Philip Morris and one who won the 1997 Oklahoma City bombing case that resulted in the execution of terrorist Timothy McVey. Wilkinson was also named “Trial Lawyer of the Year” in February. On Tuesday, Sen. Kamala Harris emphasized that Ford is not on trial here, tweeting, “This hearing is to determine whether Kavanaugh is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. By hiring a private attorney to cross-examine Dr. Blasey Ford, Republicans are trying to intimidate her and avoid being held accountable by voters.” | |
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| 09-25-18 11:26am - 2297 days | #1170 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Brett Kavanaugh deserves a fair hearing. Then he deserves a fair trial where he is tried for perjury, lieing under oath. That should be enough to get him disbarred as a lawyer, and removed from any post as a judge. There has to be plenty of evidence that Kavanaugh has lied under oath. President Trump pledged to drain the swamp in Washington. Let him take a first step by ordering an investigation of Brett Kavanaugh. Republicans would question Donald Trump's sanity. Because Republicans are the party of hypocrites. | |
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| 09-25-18 11:20am - 2297 days | #1169 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The Independent Brett Kavanaugh: Five major contradictions Trump's Supreme Court nominee made in unprecedented interview The Independent Chris Riotta,The Independent 58 minutes ago Brett Kavanaugh has provided an emotional and full-throated defence against sexual assault allegations during an unprecedented interview with Fox News. The Supreme Court nominee and his wife Ashley Kavanaugh sat down to discuss accusations brought against him by Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who alleged he pinned her down and made unwanted sexual advances towards her at a party in high school, and another report of sexual misconduct during his college years. A third allegation arrived shortly after the interview was released from an unnamed woman represented by Michael Avenatti. The interview featured an adamant and visibly hurt Mr Kavanaugh, who vowed he wasn't "going anywhere" and would proceed with the nomination process. However, he appeared to contradict numerous reports and statements from associates throughout his life which cast a damaging picture of the US district judge. Commentators said it was highly unusual, if not entirely unprecedented, for a nominee to appear in a television interview before his confirmation. Below are some of the most contradictory elements to Mr Kavanaugh's Fox News interview: Brett Kavanaugh said the supposed college incident "would have been the talk of the campus". It was. The judge appeared to refute sexual assault claims brought against him by Deborah Ramirez, who said Mr Kavanaugh drunkenly exposed himself to her at a dormitory party at Yale and made her touch his penis without her consent, by suggesting nobody on campus ever heard of or spoke about the alleged incident. However, numerous Yale alumni have said they recall hearing about the event in question involving both Ms Ramirez and Mr Kavanaugh shortly after it supposedly happened. One unnamed classmate said they were “one hundred per cent sure” they were told at the time about the judge’s unwanted advances onto Ms Ramirez. "I’ve known this all along,” he told the New Yorker. “It’s been on my mind all these years when his name came up. It was a big deal." Not only have several former students said the alleged incident was discussed on campus at the time, but others have also said it was brought back up amongst alumni immediately after Donald Trump nominated Mr Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The judge said the people he knew in college found the claims "inconceivable". They don't. The judge kept referring to the numerous folks who have vouched for him throughout his life, including college friends who spoke out shortly after the second round of sex assault allegations were brought against him. But his college roommate James Roche told the New Yorker the judge was "frequently, incoherently drunk" while adding: "Is it believable that she was alone with a wolf group of guys who thought it was funny to sexually torment a girl like Debbie? Yeah, definitely. Is it believable that Kavanaugh was one of them? Yes." Even two of the judge’s friends who signed a statement of support provided by his lawyers did not appear wholeheartedly convinced of his innocence. In separate statements to the New Yorker, Louisa Garry and Dino Ewing both said “I cannot dispute Ramirez’s allegations, as I was not present” and “I also was not present and therefore am not in a position to directly dispute Ramirez’s account”. Mr Kavanaugh said he was "focused on academics and athletics" in high school. He called himself the treasurer of the "Keg City Club" in his yearbook. Mr Kavanaugh painted himself as a devout Catholic teenager with a passion for academia and sports, who was a virgin until “many years” after high school. “The vast majority of the time I spent in high school was studying or focused on sports and being a good friend to the boys and the girls that I was friends with,” he told Fox News. However, in his own yearbook page, the judge described himself as the treasurer of the “Keg City Club,” an apparent reference to his group of friends who reportedly enjoyed drinking and throwing parties while attending Georgetown Preparatory high school. His former classmate and friend Mark Judge also wrote a book which included a character named Bart O’Kavanaugh, who was a heavy drinker. The New York Times also published a story highlighting a reference in his yearbook page to “Renate Alumnus,” which appears in some form numerous times throughout the yearbook and appears to be a mocking joke against Renate Schroeder, a former student from a nearby girls’ school. His page also includes references to things like "100 kegs or bust" — which of course appear to reference drinking, not religious studies, academia or athletics. He repeatedly called for "a fair process", but did not support relaunching an FBI investigation, which would provide fairness to both sides. Though Mr Kavanaugh was provided the opportunity to expressly support a renewed FBI investigation into the claims against him, the judge simply asserted he wanted “a fair process”, repeating the phrase on multiple occasions throughout the interview. “All I am asking for is a fair process where I can be heard,” he said. “I am looking for a fair process, a process where I can defend my integrity and clear my name.” “Again, just asking for a fair process where I can be heard and I did defend my integrity,” he continued. While “fair” could be interpreted in many ways in this event dependent on political ideologies, one would assume a neutral judge considers a “fair” case one that is properly investigated on both sides. The judge said the New York Times "could not corroborate" the New Yorker story. That's simply not true. Mr Kavanaugh alleged the New York Times was not able to substantiate the claims made against him, though the paper has said no such thing. In fact, the Times’ editor Dean Baquet celebrated journalist Ronan Farrow’s reporting in the New Yorker. "I gather some people thought we were trying to knock down [Ramirez’s] account, but that’s not what we were doing," he said on Monday. "I’m not questioning their story. We’ve been competing against Ronan Farrow for a year and he’s terrific." | |
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| 09-25-18 11:04am - 2297 days | #1168 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
People who completely believe Brett Kavanaugh are either committed Republicans who put the party first, or else they are people who have turned off their minds to any conflicting evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is a practiced liar who is getting more practice as he lies under oath and lies in interviews. -------- -------- Politics Brett Kavanaugh's Body Language Says It All, According To An Expert Refinery29 Natalie Gontcharova,Refinery29 4 hours ago Thanks to Senate confirmation hearings, we now have hours and hours of video of Judge Brett Kavanaugh at our disposal. If there were any body language pattern to establish from these, it's that he seems scared. He squirms, he smirks, he mugs — and he evades questions. Kavanaugh has reason to be scared — he has had multiple sexual assault allegations brought against him, and on Thursday, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is slated to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee about the night he allegedly drunkenly forced himself on her in high school. On Monday night, Kavanaugh and his wife Ashley sat down for a largely friendly interview with Fox News' Martha MacCallum in which he asked for a "fair process where I can be heard and I can defend my integrity" 12 times. Body language expert Patti Wood, author of Snap: Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language, and Charisma, says that his conduct in the interview said volumes about his past. "What happened was very complex," she tells Refinery29. "It was not a real interview. He controlled what was happening. He was not surprised by any questions. He spent the majority of the time, according to my transcript analysis, talking about what a good guy he was." So, what exactly is Brett Kavanaugh trying to tell us with his perpetual smug grin? Ahead, read Wood's further analysis of the Fox News interview, as well as key moments in Kavanaugh's hearings, for insight into what the Supreme Court nominee is truly thinking. Fox News Interview When analyzing the transcript of the Fox News interview, Wood highlighted two types of statements: Kavanaugh's denials ("I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone in high school or otherwise") and his statements about how wholesome he is ("I was focused on trying to be number-one in my class and being captain of the varsity basketball team and doing my service projects, going to church"). She found that the amount of time he spends on his good-behavior statements — when he talks about church, friends, and school — far outweighs how long he dedicates to denials. "Normally an innocent person wants to spend a lot of time denying what happened," she says. "They want to make sure you know they didn’t do it. They don’t change the subject to another part of their life and talk about going to church." Opening Statement In the opening statement of his confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh expresses a platitude about friendship, something he also said in his commencement speech at Catholic University Law School: "Cherish your friends. Look out for your friends. Lift up your friends. Love your friends. … I thank all my friends." Then he pauses to take a long drink of water. "It was at the time interesting to me, as he was very emotional in the delivery of that message and then he rather nervously took that sip of water, leaning out over the glass instead of bringing the glass back to him in a more confident manner, sure of the statement he just made," Wood says. "It was very important for him to say this. He's nervous about that statement. I can't tell you why, but that's interesting. It's not the delivery you'd expect." Wood says she can't speculate on why Kavanaugh would be feeling particularly nervous when talking about friendship, but knowing what we know about the allegations — specifically his high school best friend Mark Judge's witnessing of the alleged assault — it becomes a bit clearer. Exchange With Kamala Harris About Mueller Investigation In this particularly tense exchange, Kavanaugh deviates from what Wood calls his "baseline" behavior. Every time Sen. Harris asks him the question, there is at least 10 seconds of silence before he starts talking, while normally his responses would be quicker. He evades the question, asks Harris questions in response, and touches his face "in self-comfort." "It's as though there's a game taking place," Wood says, recalling White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders' common expression of "duping delight," or smiling out of context because your subconscious mind is taking pleasure in having fooled somebody. "The self-satisfied smile — that smug grin — is on the very edge of 'duping delight,' something Sarah Huckabee Sanders does full-on. He's in game mode there, and she, well, she's always in game mode. He's thinking, I'm winning in this game, I'm getting away with not giving you the answer." At one point, a protestor bursts into the hearing, yelling, "Be a hero and vote no!" After that, Wood notes (around 4:12), Kavanaugh takes a sip of water and sticks his tongue out in what she calls a "tongue thrust." "Think someone who got away with something on the playground, like got something over on a bully, and they stick their tongue out rather than punch the bully," she says. Taking a sip of water, she adds, is a way of covering his true emotions. "That is a coached move and he is using it to cover his anxiety and the tongue thrust shows his suppressed anger." When Harris questions him again, he again doesn't answer the question, and he holds his body away from her. "It's interesting that he is 'acting' like he does not understand what she is asking," says Wood. "I know he is acting as I have analyzed his baseline and compared his responses to more difficult and complex questions, and more specifically how his cues are timed. He hesitates, then he gives a perplexed look. He is not looking perplexed as he is asked, or even a moment later." Turning Away From Fred Guttenberg In this exchange, just as Kavanaugh gets up for a recess, Fred Guttenberg, the father of Parkland victim Jaime Guttenberg, approaches him and tries to shake his hand. Kavanaugh briefly looks at him with bewilderment, then doesn't shake his hand, and quickly walks in the other direction. Later, he would say he didn't recognize Guttenberg. "It had been a chaotic morning," Kavanaugh wrote. "I unfortunately did not realize that the man was the father of a shooting victim from Parkland, Florida. Mr. Guttenberg has suffered an incalculable loss. If I had known who he was, I would have shaken his hand, talked to him, and expressed my sympathy. And I would have listened to him." To put this in context, Kavanaugh has been skeptical about any type of gun reform. "He is clearly on the record expressing the view that it is illegal to restrict access to assault weapons like the one used in Parkland," Adam Skaggs, chief counsel at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told Vice. "He has made fairly clear that he believes regulating who can carry concealed weapons in public is constitutionally suspect. And he has outlined a view of how courts should approach Second Amendment questions that would call into question a host of the types of laws legislatures in many states have passed after Parkland." "The handshake is not a simple read," says Wood. "He would not normally shake hands in these circumstances; it's important to point out that that would be bizarre. And it's important to note that he has been under scrutiny and questioning for hours. He thinks he is done and can turn off. That time when someone thinks they can turn off is one of the most honest and revealing times. Having said that, you can see Kavanaugh's face go from bewilderment to anger to sadness as he turns away." The sadness is particularly telling, Wood says. "Sadness in that context wouldn't make sense to me with a stranger. What would make sense to me is that he did recognize who this was." | |
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| 09-25-18 10:52am - 2297 days | #1167 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Politics Brett Kavanaugh's Fox News Interview Spelled Out the Shameless Depravity of This Whole Process Esquire Jack Holmes,Esquire 2 hours 45 minutes ago Looking for a barometer of our shameless political era? Check out Fox News last night, where a nominee seeking confirmation to a lifetime position on the United States Supreme Court took to the presidential pravda network to declare that the allegations of sexual misconduct against him couldn't be true, in part because he was a virgin throughout high school "and many years thereafter." Behold, the Confessions of Judge Brett Kavanaugh: It is first of all gobsmacking to see a nominee to the nation's highest court jump on cable news to declare his virginity. We've come a long way even from John Roberts, the George W. Bush nominee for chief justice who was clearly chosen to pull the court in a certain direction-but who at least had a scrupulous veneer of dignity. Even Neil Gorsuch, while a bit smug, was a smooth prevaricator from the witness chair and an outwardly non-stunted adult. Kavanaugh has been a blundering mess throughout his process. There are major questions over whether he lied under oath to Congress. He kicked things off by declaring he'd witnessed first-hand that "no president has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination"-a lie that insults the listener's intelligence when the president is Donald J. Trump. The whole thing has reeked of tactless desperation, culminating with an interview on a right-wing cable network in the lead-up to his Senate testimony Thursday. Photo credit: Congressional Quarterly - Getty Images More importantly, though, whether or not Kavanaugh was a virgin actually has no bearing on the two allegations made against him. Neither woman-Dr. Christine Blasey Ford or Deborah Ramirez-claims that Kavanaugh had intercourse with her. Ford says Kavanaugh held her down and tried to tear her clothes off, and put his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream. Ramirez said he exposed himself to her while she was drunk on the floor at a dorm party. Are those included in Kavanaugh's description of "anything close to sexual intercourse"? More than anything, the Fox interview leaves the impression that Kavanaugh believes intercourse is necessary for an event to qualify as sexual assault. Then there's the fact that Kavanaugh's routine on Fox has been supplemented by another report on his supposed Virgin Years. Here's The New York Times' look at his yearbook: Among the reminiscences about sports and booze is a mysterious entry: “Renate Alumnius.” The word “Renate” appears at least 14 times in Georgetown Preparatory School’s 1983 yearbook, on individuals’ pages and in a group photo of nine football players, including Judge Kavanaugh, who were described as the “Renate Alumni.” It is a reference to Renate Schroeder, then a student at a nearby Catholic girls’ school. Two of Judge Kavanaugh’s classmates say the mentions of Renate were part of the football players’ unsubstantiated boasting about their conquests. “They were very disrespectful, at least verbally, with Renate,” said Sean Hagan, a Georgetown Prep student at the time, referring to Judge Kavanaugh and his teammates. “I can’t express how disgusted I am with them, then and now.” This lines up fairly evenly with accounts of Kavanaugh's time at Yale, where he was a member of a fraternity and a secret society with particular reputations. In the Fox interview, he had this to say: The vast majority of the time I spent in high school was studying or focused on sports and being a good friend to the boys and the girls that I was friends with. If so, he also spent a lot of time lying about his hard-partying and his sexual conquests. That's not all that unusual for a teenage boy, but Kavanaugh's lying seems to have extended to when he's under oath, as an adult, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It certainly extended to his nomination acceptance speech, cited above, where he suggested Trump looked anywhere beyond the list given to him by the Federalist Society when looking for a judge. (That lie wasn't even necessary-he threw it on top to lick the boot of a man who may soon have a case coming before the Supreme Court.) Like the president himself, you have to ask: Why should we believe anything this guy has to say? And beyond all that, there's the spectacle of putting Kavanaugh on Fox News. Once upon a time-around, say, the Merrick Garland Era-there was some expectation that a Supreme Court nominee would at least maintain a veneer of nonpartisanship, of fealty to the law. Maybe that was, to some extent, a sham, but it did help maintain the legitimacy of the court as an institution. Gorsuch didn't help, but Kavanaugh has pretty much put paid to that even before he sought out Fox to "rev up" his support with the conservative base-apparently part of a larger strategy from Republicans. Like the president long has, the judge and his confirmation squad now see that he only needs the support of His Team to make it through. If it is politically palatable enough for Republican senators, they will vote to confirm him regardless of whether the allegations against him have merit. After all, 19 women accused Trump of sexual misconduct and he was elected president. Republicans have basically declared outright that the hearing featuring Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford will be a fraud, and Fox mirrored that when the reprehensible Jesse Watters described Kavanaugh's strategy as "playing the V-card." That accurately suggests that whether or not Kavanaugh is telling the truth is largely irrelevant as a political consideration. It's a game: force him through and Crush the Libs. Kavanaugh is a lifetime Republican operative and an obvious partisan who is being installed on the court, via expressly political tactics and maneuvering, to accomplish political goals for the conservative movement. Going on Fox News is just the icing here. Maybe stripping the coat of nonpartisan legitimacy off the Supreme Court is what's needed in this era, which increasingly is marked as much by brutal honesty as shameless lying. The president is the ever-present force of this epoch, and while he lies constantly, he also tends to expose some American institutions for what they really are. If there's anything useful to take from these times, maybe it's that more of our politics were always a sham than we were ready to admit. | |
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| 09-25-18 04:31am - 2297 days | #2 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Bring it on. Does this mean I can enjoy porn with an empty mind?  | |
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| 09-24-18 09:43pm - 2297 days | #1166 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
___ ECONOMY TRUMP: "I don't think we've ever had an economy like this." — remarks Wednesday on White House's South Lawn. THE FACTS: The president is correct as far as that statement goes, but not entirely in the favorable ways he suggests. It is true that the U.S. economy is relatively healthy with solid hiring gains and a strong stock market. Growth got an adrenaline boost this year because of the deficit-financed tax cuts that Trump signed into law last year. But economic growth has hardly ascended to a new peak. The 4.2 percent annual growth in the second quarter was bested twice, as recently as 2014 under President Barack Obama. Instead, what makes the U.S. economy unique under Trump are major trends that aren't very positive: —Never has the U.S. economy been involved in a trade conflict equal to the magnitude of its current showdown with China. The tariffs imposed by the Trump administration and China's retaliations have opened up a battle between the world's two largest economies that could last for weeks or decades, according to trade experts. —Never has the federal deficit been set to climb so high during a period of economic stability. When Trump cut taxes last year, he piled on roughly $1.5 trillion of debt over the next decade. Additional spending in his budget only added to the imbalance. Publicly held government debt will be equal in size to the entire U.S. gross domestic product in 2028, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That's the most since 1946, when the United States was coming out of World War II and the Great Depression. —Income inequality has worsened. Someone in the top 5 percent of earners makes 3.86 times more than the median U.S. household with an income of $61,372, according to the Census Bureau. That is the highest gap ever tracked by Census data going back 50 years. In 1967, the top 5 percent earned 2.66 times the median. These forces have helped lead the economy into seemingly unprecedented territory under Trump. ___ FEDERAL JUDGES TRUMP: "We'll have more judges put on than any other president other than one. Do you know who the one is? George Washington. Percentage wise." ''You know I have 145 (judges nominated), plus hopefully two Supreme Court judges. And that's assuming nobody leaves the bench which they will over the next period of time." ''I often say, 'Who has highest percentage of federal judges.' They say, 'You do.' I'll say, 'No, no. I got killed.' They said, 'George Washington' ... because he appointed a hundred percent of the judges." — interview released Wednesday with Hill TV. THE FACTS: Not so fast. His claim of appointing more judges than any other president except for perhaps Washington is highly questionable, according to an analysis of judicial appointment data conducted for The Associated Press. So far Trump has appointed 68 judges who have been confirmed to the federal courts. That translates to about 8 percent of the total federal judgeships at the 20-month mark in his presidency. That lags at least four previous presidents in terms of both raw numbers and percentages, said Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and expert on judicial appointments. Wheeler, a former deputy director of the Federal Judicial Center, crunched historical data from the center and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. He found that Trump trails Republican presidents George W. Bush (77) and Ronald Reagan (7  , as well as Democrats Bill Clinton (85) and John F. Kennedy (109) at comparable points in their presidencies.Wheeler also put together a ranking based on the number of appointees in 20 months as a percentage of "authorized judgeships," or the total seats created by Congress. Trump lagged at least 17 other presidents, including Washington, who as the first president appointed 100 percent of the federal judges. At the 20-month mark, for instance, Kennedy appointees occupied roughly 27 percent of the judicial seats then authorized by Congress, far higher than Trump's 8 percent. Trump appears to be including in his cited figure those he has nominated to the federal bench, but who have not yet been confirmed. Even when accounting for that, Trump's total of confirmed judges and current nominees represents 16 percent of the total judgeships. Kennedy and Grover Cleveland reached higher percentages based on their confirmed judges alone. "It's hard to comprehend what President Trump exactly meant by his statement," Wheeler told the AP. "He does have a strong record so far in appointments to the U.S. Court of Appeals — 20 months in, Trump appointees occupy 15 percent of authorized circuit judgeships — but on that score he still trails Kennedy and Eisenhower, and Grover Cleveland, for that matter." ___ TARIFFS TRUMP: "Tariffs have put the U.S. in a very strong bargaining position, with Billions of Dollars, and Jobs, flowing into our Country - and yet cost increases have thus far been almost unnoticeable. If countries will not make fair deals with us, they will be 'Tariffed!'" — tweet Sept. 17. THE FACTS: In trade talks with China, Canada and Mexico, it's not entirely clear how much of an advantage the United States has gained from the tariffs. The import taxes imposed on steel and aluminum have been pressure points. So are the tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods, with the president suggesting he's prepared to tax an additional $467 billion of imports from China. But Americans have to see a final deal with Canada or China to assess whether these taxes are delivering a better bargain. Still, have tariffs brought in billions of dollars and jobs without increasing inflation? Yes, the tariffs have brought in slightly more revenue. It's hard to know if they've helped create jobs. And the companies closest to the tariffs say that, yes, inflation is a risk. In theory, the tariffs should add money to federal coffers. The 25 percent tax the Trump administration slapped on $50 billion of Chinese imports should raise $12.5 billion if the flow of goods continues without interruption. And even though many tariffs haven't been in place long enough to determine whether they're helping draw in significantly more revenue, the Treasury Department said there has been a $5.4 billion jump in the collection of customs and duties so far this fiscal year. Some of this increase is due to more imports. But customs and duties account for just 1.2 percent of federal revenues, so any increase from tariffs does little to address the ballooning budget deficit. The U.S. economy was adding jobs before the tariffs were announced, and it has been adding jobs since. It's hard to know at this stage how the tariffs have influenced the pace of job creation, since any analysis would need to consider the whole of the nine-year expansion and the stimulus from Trump's deficit-funded tax cut. ___ TRUMP: "Our Steel Industry is the talk of the World. It has been given new life, and is thriving. Billions of Dollars is being spent on new plants all around the country!" — tweet Sept. 17. THE FACTS: Trump has certainly helped steelmakers, but so far it's not the dramatic turnaround that he portrays. Analysts at Citibank said this month that steel companies have approved more than $3 billion in investment following the tariffs. Some steel mills have restarted closed mills and added new capacity. Manufacturers focused on primary metals have added 7,100 workers in the past 12 months for a total of 381,700 jobs, according to the Labor Department. But that total still lags the 402,600 jobs with primary metal manufacturers at the end of 2014. A stronger dollar and lower oil prices hurt the demand for steel products, causing production and employment to fall. And Trump is a long way from the more than 450,000 jobs in this sector at the start of 2008. More importantly, steel is a modest component of U.S. job growth. Primary metals represented just 0.3 percent of the 2.33 million job gains in the past year. ___ Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report. | |
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| 09-24-18 09:42pm - 2297 days | #1165 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Donald Trump, not satisfied with raping young girls, has always tried to rape the truth. That is why he keeps tweeting that the news is fake news: Because he doesn't know any other kind of news except fake news. ----------- ----------- Associated Press AP FACT CHECK: Trump wrong on judges, 'plummeting' poverty Associated Press HOPE YEN and CALVIN WOODWARD,Associated Press 23 hours ago WASHINGTON (AP) — As the midterm elections draw near, President Donald Trump's tendency to declare his campaign promises fulfilled when they aren't has come into starker relief. He insists poverty in the U.S. is "plummeting," even though the number of poor people has barely declined under his watch and income inequality is climbing. Jousting with Democrats in advance of the November midterms, Trump also declares a premature victory from his tariffs by pointing to a manufacturing renaissance that has yet to be and boasts of promises kept on "full" funding for improvements at the Department of Veterans Affairs. In fact, long-term financing for a key VA health care program remains uncertain. On judges, Trump's comments about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's accuser betrayed a misunderstanding of how FBI investigations work. And his claim to be in the league of George Washington when it comes to placing judges on the federal bench is refuted by the record. A look at some of the rhetoric over the past week from Trump and members of Congress: POVERTY TRUMP: "Poverty is plummeting." — rally Thursday in Las Vegas. THE FACTS: He's overstating it. The poverty rate dropped only modestly under Trump's watch, to 12.3 percent in 2017 from 12.7 percent in 2016. At the same time, nearly 40 million Americans remained poor by the Census Bureau's count, statistically unchanged from 2016. Wealthier Americans, meanwhile, pulled farther ahead last year. Even steady growth over the previous eight years hasn't been enough to counter long-running trends to greater economic inequality. Income growth was strongest for the richest 5 percent of households, rising 3 percent to $237,034. For the poorest one-fifth of the population, incomes rose just 0.5 percent. As a result, the wealthiest 5 percent received 3.9 times the income earned by the median U.S. household. That's the highest on record, dating back to 1967. It's true that in the last three years, the poverty rate has dropped steadily by 2.5 percentage points, from a recent peak of 14.8 percent in 2014. The biggest chunk of that drop occurred from 2014 to 2016, during the Obama administration. The Census Bureau also considers the impact of various government assistance programs on reducing the ranks of the poor. The agency found that the food stamp program, formally known as SNAP, lifted 3.4 million people out of poverty. Rental subsidies did the same for 2.9 million. Trump and House Republican leaders have proposed cuts in those programs. ___ VETERANS TRUMP: "Just today I signed a new bill fully funding Veterans Choice for our great veterans." — rally Friday in Springfield, Missouri. TRUMP: "Promises Kept for our GREAT Veterans!" — tweet Friday. TRUMP: "We are delivering the resources needed to fully implement crucial VA reforms ... to deliver for our great veterans." — remarks Friday in North Las Vegas, Nevada. THE FACTS: He isn't telling the full story. The private-sector health-care program lacks a long-term source of government funding that could put it or other domestic programs subject to budget caps at risk of major shortfalls next year. Trump signed legislation in June to expand the Veterans Choice program as an alternative to medical care provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The new program will give veterans wider access to private-sector physicians outside the VA if they must endure lengthy wait times or the treatment wasn't what they had expected. The government-paid program is projected to face escalating costs, including a $1 billion shortfall next summer. A bipartisan group of senators had sought to address long-term funding by adding new money to cover the private care program, but the White House opposed that as "anathema to responsible spending." It maintained that added costs should be paid for by cutting other domestic programs, including possibly some at VA. Congress included in the VA spending bill a one-year money fix for the expanded Choice program, putting aside discussion until next year on how to pay its estimated added costs of $8 billion next fall and $9 billion in 2020. Trump signed that bill last week. The Choice program has already involved high levels of spending, leading to two unexpected budget shortfalls during Trump's first year in office. ___ KAVANAUGH TRUMP, on Christine Blasey Ford's allegation that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party in the 1980s: "The radical left lawyers want the FBI to get involved NOW. Why didn't someone call the FBI 36 years ago?" — tweet Friday. THE FACTS: The FBI would not have been the number to call. The behavior alleged by Ford is not a federal crime but one that might have been investigated by local authorities if reported. She said he pinned her on a bed and tried taking off her clothes during a high school party in Maryland in the 1980s; Kavanaugh denies the allegations. Democrats want the FBI to get involved now because the bureau conducts background checks on presidential nominees. The FBI background check of Kavanaugh was completed before the allegations emerged. Democrats and various advocates, not just "radical left lawyers," want the FBI to reopen its investigation in light of the accusation. The FBI can only do so if the White House requests that step. Trump is trying to cast suspicion on Ford's credibility by questioning why the then-teenager "or her loving parents" did not go to the police "if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says," as he put it in another tweet. It has long been the norm for sexual assaults to go unreported to authorities. A Justice Department report estimated that from 1992 to 2000, slightly more than one-third of rapes or attempted rapes were reported to police, only 26 percent of sexual assaults and less than 10 percent on college campuses. ___ TRUMP, on Democratic calls for the FBI to reopen its background investigation: "Well, it would seem that the FBI really doesn't do that. They've investigated about six times before, and it seems that they don't do that." — remarks Wednesday. DEMOCRATIC SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN of California: "Fact check: The FBI can investigate Dr. Blasey Ford's allegations as part of its background investigation - that is their job. To say otherwise is FALSE. It investigated Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. It should investigate this too." — tweet Tuesday. THE FACTS: Neither Trump nor Feinstein is entirely correct. Only the White House can order the FBI to look into the claim as part of Kavanaugh's background investigation because Ford is not accusing Kavanaugh of a federal crime. The FBI could interview Ford, Kavanaugh and others about the allegation if Trump asked the bureau to reopen its background investigation. But Trump said the FBI has already done its work. Each side's take on the propriety of a reopened FBI probe has political calculations. Republicans are seeking to wrap up Kavanaugh's confirmation quickly while they are still in control of the Senate, and Democrats view it as more advantageous to delay a vote until after the November elections, when they hope to gain a majority. As for Feinstein's point that the FBI investigated Hill's accusations against Thomas, that's true but it was because Republican President George H.W. Bush asked the bureau to do so. On Sunday, Democrats renewed their request for Trump to direct a FBI investigation of Ford's claims. | |
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| 09-24-18 09:19pm - 2297 days | #1164 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The truth comes out: Christine Ford was mistaken about who tried to rape her while in high school. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) went on national television and suggested that Ford was “mistaken” and “mixed up.” This is almost certainly the truth. Christine Ford has tried to hide the real truth: it was President Donald Trump, before he became president, who raped Christine Ford. This is free speech, protected by the constitution. And any public awareness of this is for the benefit of President Trump, the most corrupt president the US has ever had. Will Trump try to make money off the Christine Ford case? Does he have sex tapes he can sell to Pornhub or other sleazoid sites? My best guess: Donald Trump and his family have strong connections to the Mafia, who are famous for their interests in porn. Trump's family is willing to shield both the Mafia and its porn sites from any investigation. --------- --------- HuffPost Opinion Republicans Don’t Care About Women And Their Sham Hearing For Blasey Ford Proves It HuffPost Opinion Kurt Bardella,HuffPost Opinion 12 hours ago The president of the United States, the Senate Majority Leader, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the Judiciary Committee’s senior staff, two senators who serve on the Judiciary Committee and a network of conservative groups have spent the past week trying to railroad an alleged victim of sexual assault. Is it really hard to grasp why Dr. Christine Blasey Ford has been reluctant to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee and field questions, possibly from an un-elected, outside counsel acting as the GOP’s hired gun? One week ago, Ford courageously came forward with allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a party in high school. Just as they did with sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump and Roy Moore before, the Republican Party has looked the other way, in the process revealing to the American people the extraordinary lengths they will go to suppress the truth and silence women in America. It turns out Republicans were trying to beat the clock as some Senate Republican staffers were reportedly already aware of another allegation of sexual misconduct that occurred during Kavanaugh’s college years that became public on Sunday night. Republican men who run the Judiciary Committee and the Senate have openly declared that they don’t believe Ford and that nothing she says can change their mind. The Republican smear machine went into action as conservative conspiracy theorist Ed Whelan began stalking Ford on LinkedIn – even before her name became public. Since the only people who knew Ford’s identity at that point were The Washington Post and the White House, it’s not hard to ascertain who leaked her name to Whelan. If Democrats retake control of Congress in November, there will almost certainly be an investigation into the White House’s handling of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Ford has spent the last week being subjected to the same sexist responses from Republican men ― including the president ― that Anita Hill experienced in 1991. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who was a part of those proceedings 17 years ago, went on national television and suggested that Ford was “mistaken” and “mixed up.” The idea that a victim of sexual assault would somehow misidentify her attacker reveals the level of ignorance and blatant sexism that exists throughout the Republican Party. From there, a conservative public relations firm with close ties to both the White House and the Senate Judiciary Committee orchestrated a blatant smear campaign against Ford that culminated with Whelan falsely suggesting that someone else had sexually assaulted her. Mike Davis, the Judiciary Committee staffer in charge of nominations for Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), tweeted defiantly, “Unfazed and determined. We will confirm Judge Kavanaugh. #ConfirmKavanaugh #SCOTUS.” The all-male Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have the audacity to question her memory, judgment, character and morality. Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed Davis’ tweet in a speech on Friday. “Here’s what I want to tell you: In the very near future, Judge Kavanaugh will be on the United States Supreme Court,” he declared. “We’re gonna plow right through it and do our job.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), also a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Fox News that he’s not “going to ruin Judge Kavanaugh’s life over this” and that Ford’s testimony in front of the committee wouldn’t change anything as far as he was concerned. Amid all of this, a press adviser helping to lead the Senate Judiciary Committee’s attacks on Ford had to resign because of previous sexual harassment allegations made against him. So the Republican men who run the Judiciary Committee and the Senate have openly declared that they don’t believe her and that nothing she says can change their mind. The last thing Senate Republicans are interested in is the truth. They spent the bulk of the week trying to bully Ford into participating in a sham hearing designed to discredit her and expedite the confirmation of Kavanaugh. If Senate Republicans were serious about sex crimes, they would put the brakes on Thursday’s scheduled hearing to hear from Ford and Kavanaugh. And the president would direct the FBI to re-open their background investigation into Kavanaugh. But that’s not happening. Instead, the all-male Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are trying to orchestrate this rigged hearing where Ford will be cross-examined on national television by the best litigator taxpayer money can buy. They don’t even have the guts to question her themselves. But they have the audacity to question her memory, judgment, character and morality. By their actions, Senate Republicans have revealed their true selves: scared, weak and cowardly old men whose time is almost up. Kurt Bardella is a HuffPost columnist and the former spokesperson and Senior Advisor for the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee and U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). Follow him on Twitter: @kurtbardella This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 09-24-18 08:45pm - 2297 days | #1163 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Judge says that Donald Trump's tweets are protected free speech. The president can call people rapists, thieves, murderers, con-men, whatever, it's all good. All politicians have the right of free speech. I'm not sure if regular people have the same rights of free speech. But politicians are special people, who have extra-ordinary rights. Trump has claimed that instead of being harmed, if he calls someone a rapist or thug or crook, that person is not harmed, but benefits from the increased level of public awareness. The law is a strange beast: it listens to the most outlandish bullshit, and gives forth bullshit in return. Bullshit, not truth or justice. That is great news for Trump, who is the best bullshit artist of any president we've ever had. ---------- ---------- Bloomberg politics Judge Leans Toward Tossing Stormy Daniels Defamation Suit Against Trump By Edvard Pettersson and Erik Larson September 24, 2018, 3:38 PM PDT Updated on September 24, 2018, 5:12 PM PDT Stormy Daniels’s libel lawsuit over a tweet by Donald Trump looks to be doomed after a judge said the president was engaging in free speech. The adult film star, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claims she was threatened by an unknown man in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011 for agreeing to cooperate with a magazine article about a tryst she says she had with Trump in 2006. After her lawyer released a composite sketch of the man, Trump accused Clifford in an April tweet of “a total con job" concerning a “nonexistent man.” U.S. District Judge S. James Otero said at a hearing Monday that considering such statements as defamation would have a chilling effect on candidates running for office and hamper political discourse. “This appears to be rhetorical hyperbole by a public official involving a public figure,” Otero said. He didn’t issue an immediate ruling. Trump’s lawyer, Charles Harder, argued the tweet wasn’t a statement of fact -- it was the president’s way of “calling BS” on Clifford’s claim, or calling it “hogwash.” Trump has argued in court papers that Clifford, instead of being harmed, has benefited financially from her public dispute with him. Otero said he would hold a hearing in December over whether to dismiss a separate case in which Clifford challenged the validity of a $130,000 "hush payment" deal she struck with Trump’s longtime fixer Michael Cohen before the 2016 presidential election. Trump and Cohen say the suit should be dismissed because each declared this month that he won’t fight to enforce the agreement. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, contends it’s in the public interest to keep the case going so the truth about the agreement can be made public. He wants to force Trump and Cohen to give sworn testimony in depositions. In the months leading up to Cohen’s guilty last plea in August to campaign finance violations, Clifford’s case made a TV personality of Avenatti, who has expressed interest in running for president in 2020. Kavanaugh Nomination Monday’s hearing took place less than 24 hours after Avenatti made a bombshell claim on a separate matter that’s captured the nation’s attention: the battle surrounding Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Sunday, Avenatti took to Twitter to say he’s representing a woman with claims of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh -- the third woman to come forward with such allegations. That follows claims already made by a California professor and a second woman detailed in a report Sunday by the New Yorker. Only Avenatti’s client has yet to be identified. He said on Twitter on Monday that he needs to have security measures put in place before revealing her name. Outside court, Avenatti said he’ll release his client’s name in the next few days and “the American people will believe her.” The cases are Clifford v. Trump, 18-cv-02217 and 18-cv-06893, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles). (Updates with Trump lawyer’s argument in fifth paragraph.) | |
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| 09-24-18 08:27pm - 2297 days | #1162 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Kavanaugh claims he was a virgin while in high school He claims he was also a virgin for many years after high school. So, any stories he had sex or tried to have sex with women are totally fake. Brett Kavanaugh, second-in-command of the Moral Majority for a White America, only one step down from our glorious leader in Christ, President Donald Trump. It has now been revealed that Donald Trump is also a virgin. Although Trump does have children, these children are the direct result of God Himself coming down from Heaven to impregnate Donald Trump's wives. So it would not be illegal for Donald Trump to have sex with any of his children: male or female. Trump really wants to hump Ivanka, but he's also been considering Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. Donald, we knew you were just too good to be true. Can anyone prove that Donald Trump is not a virgin? Is there a medical test that will prove Donald Trump is not a virgin? Even if Stormy Daniels and that Playboy Playmate testify that Donald Trump slept with them, had sex with them, is that proof that Donald Trump is not a virgin? Of course it isn't proof. Trump has denied sleeping with them. Meaning that Trump, by implication, has denied having sex with them. President Donald Trump, the virgin, leader of the Moral Majority for a White America. How many virgin presidents has the United States ever had? My guess is that Donald Trump is the first virgin President of the United States. But Trump will pass an amendment to the constitution, requiring all future presidents to be virgins. And the same for justices on the Supreme Court. These are high offices, that require the great moral courage of extraordinary men. (No women need apply.) ------------- ------------- Kavanaugh floats virginity defense amid sexual assault allegations David Knowles 3 hours ago Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh put forth an alibi Monday to try to shoot down claims that he sexually assaulted one woman while in high school and another while attending college: At the time of both alleged incidents, he was a virgin. “We’re talking about allegations of sexual assault,” Kavanaugh told Martha MacCallum of Fox News during a joint interview with his wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh. “I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone. I did not have sexual intercourse, or anything close to sexual intercourse, in high school or for many years thereafter…” MacCallum then followed up on Kavanaugh’s assertion. “So you’re saying through all these years that are in question that you were a virgin?” she asked. “That’s correct,” Kavanaugh replied. Two women — Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez — have come forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Neither has described their encounter as involving sexual intercourse. In a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Ford described a high school party at which she said Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge locked her in a room at a home in suburban Maryland in the early 1980s. “They locked the door and played loud music, precluding any successful attempts to yell for help,” Ford said in her letter. “Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with Judge, who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state.” Ramirez offered her account of sexual assault to the New Yorker magazine. Describing a party at Yale University, where she and Kavanaugh were enrolled at the time, Ramirez claims Kavanaugh exposed himself and thrust his penis in her face before she was able to push him away. Brett Kavanaugh, with his wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, answers questions during a Fox News interview about allegations of sexual misconduct. (Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP) With what had once seemed a sure-fire confirmation process suddenly thrown into doubt, President Trump’s pick for the high court continued to sternly deny that he had acted inappropriately with either woman. “I’m not going to let false accusations drive us out of this process, and we’re looking for a fair process where I can be heard and defend my integrity, my lifelong record,” Kavanaugh said during his remarkable appearance on Fox News, “my lifelong record of promoting dignity and equality for women, starting with the women who knew me when I was 14 years old. I’m not going anywhere.” Ford will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, after which Kavanaugh will have the opportunity to respond. | |
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| 09-24-18 06:37pm - 2297 days | #1161 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Bill Cosby to get less than 3 years behind bars for 2004 rape. After spending millions of dollars prosecuting Cosby, and finally finding him guilty, the judge decides that less than 3 years in prison, on guilty charges that could have totaled 30 years in prison. Makes you wonder: I've saw a case years ago where someone taking a chair from an abandoned house was sentenced to far more than 3 years. All it takes is money, and a judge that sheds tears for the rapist. Maybe Trump can give Cosby a Medal of Honor for standing up for rapists everywhere, asserting the rights of men to fuck women over. Cosby and Kavanaugh, Men of Honor. Even though Cosby is black. Maybe Cosby only deserves a second-class Medal of Honor. ----- ----- Bill Cosby To Get Less Than Three Years Behind Bars For 2004 Rape, Says Judge by Dominic Patten September 24, 2018 12:48pm Despite heartfelt pleas in victims impact statements and sharp words from lawyers on both sides, Bill Cosby will see the inside of a prison cell for the 2004 rape of Andrea Constand for less than three years, the judge in the Cosby criminal case told a Pennsylvania courtroom Monday. “All I am asking for is justice as the court sees it,” a confident Constand said Monday in a short stint on the stand, looking directly at Judge Steven O’Neill. Referring the court and the nearby Cosby to her detailed testimony in both the original 2017 mistrial and the retrial this spring, the former Temple University employee was followed on the stand by her mother, also a witness in the two trials. In April, Cosby was found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault. With each count carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years, the 81-year-old actor could have been hit with a three-decade sentence behind bars. He is currently under house arrest and out on $1 million bail. But no matter what the Constand family wants, with the lawyers’ arguments on both sides and Cosby’s inevitable appeal looming, that 30-year lockup just isn’t going to happen. On Day 1 of the sentencing hearing for Cosby with a vital defense witness still to come tomorrow, O’Neill revealed that the often-clashing Montgomery County District Attorney’s office and the defendant’s lawyer had agreed to a deal of sorts. “Counts two and three have been merged into count one,” O’Neill said this afternoon in suburban Norristown, PA. Looking at the state guidelines and their wiggle room, he declared that once A-lister Cosby was looking at a total jail time of 22 to 34 months in final sentencing. The District Attorney’s office said that while it was part of the deal merging the counts, they sought to go to “the high end.” That would translate into 10 years in prison for Cosby, a $25,000 fine, court costs and a psychosexual evaluation – now unlikely from what O’Neill said earlier in the day. Explaining his thinking in this #MeToo and Time’s Up era, a tempered O’Neill told the court he had examined the pre-sentence investigation, sentencing guidelines and victims’ impact statements, the commonwealth and defense sentencing memo, with letters from doctors and other notables in the latter. In a sometimes shaky voice before the packed courtroom, Constand’s mother Gianna later emotionally described “the drugging and sexual assault my daughter endured in 2004 by Bill Cosby” as an erosive horror in her life, only equaled by the death of her father. “I deal with my trauma on a daily basis,” she added of the toxic and destructive effect of the event, and the legal, psychological and physical fallout for her family even with a $3.8 million civil case settlement reached with Cosby around 2006. Andrew Constand also took the stand to deliver his own victim’s impact statement, saying he was the “proudest man in the world” because of his daughter. The elder Constand detailed the “sadness” that hangs “like a dark cloud” over him and his family to this day. In a near completely silent courtroom as Cosby looked on, Constand took a moment in the relatively short statement to thank those who have supported and “believed” his daughter. “The impact of this event will never go away,” Constand’s sister added on the stand about Andrea being “drugged and sexually assaulted,” and the attacks in the media and by Cosby’s defense lawyers. With a suddenly delayed defense witness in the matter of the state’s recommendation that Cosby be designated a sexually violent predator, the victim statements have a limited scope beyond emotion. Also, O’Neill has said he believes he can’t rule on a sentence until the predator issue is resolved, which pushes everything until Tuesday morning at the earliest when Dr. Timothy Foley appears to be available to discuss the state’s recommendation of registering Cosby under that designation. In the meantime, with no indication Cosby will be saying anything himself, the defense and the prosecution presented their different closing arguments for the delayed sentencing. “Public opinion can swallow whole the rule of law,” defense leader Joseph Green said in a measured tone, summarizing the bulk of the revolving door of attorneys’ long-held argument that Cosby is being somewhat stitched up for indiscretions. “In a high-profile case where there are lots of advocates, there can be challenges,” the lawyer added, emphasizing Cosby’s poor beginnings and battles against discrimination in his climb to success. In many ways the same as arguments previous Cosby lawyers have made in past trial performances, this was the relatively recently hired Green’s first swing at that bat. “Eighty-one year old blind men are not dangerous,” he softly stressed, seeking to swat away the sexually violent predator designation in favor of continued house arrest or similar sentencing — in fact if not name — for his client. Returning again and again to the “court of public opinion,” Green also tried to talk away a personal attack that a “frustrated” Cosby made verbally towards D.A. Kevin Steele over the case, a jab noted in the prosecution’s sentencing filings. Tellingly, the defense lawyer did not mention the defense’s repeated and so far failed attempts to get O’Neill to take himself off the case. Nor did Green note how the absent Camille Cosby filed a “misconduct” compliant with the state’s judicial board against O’Neill and put out a flurry of press releases ahead of the sentencing hearing. “He seemingly doesn’t think he has done anything wrong,” Steele said today in his own remarks regarding Cosby, who sat no more than 20 feet away. “No remorse,” the increasingly worked up Steele bluntly stated, with his voice rising. “We know who this guy is — certainly not the act he played on TV,” Steele added of the man once commonly referred to as “America’s Dad.” Dismissing any notion that the actor’s age and health should exempt him for state prison, Steele slammed the “victim shaming” he said Cosby’s various lawyers and representatives aimed for in and out of court. “Nobody’s above the law,” he concluded. In the past few years, more than 60 women have come forward to claim Cosby drugged and/or assaulted them over the past five decades in similar circumstances to what Constand described in her case. There are several civil cases ongoing against Cosby, but because Pennsylvania has a much longer statute of limitations on sex crimes than most states, he pulled into court on criminal charges in late 2015 just before time ran out on the Constand case. Despite admitting in depositions more than a decade ago to giving Benadryl pills to Constand on the night of the apparent assault in his Philadelphia-area mansion more than a decade ago, Cosby has unsuccessfully insisted through various investigations and two trials that the encounter with the ex-Temple basketball team employee was consensual. Cosby, Constand, the lawyers and O’Neill are expected back in court at 9 AM ET Tuesday for a the sexually violent predator ruling and eventually final sentencing. | |
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