Author: Raymond

 
From Shaun Mullen in The Moderate Voice:

And so, as the end game comes into sight, Kavanaugh’s catagorical denials have become the second biggest lie in Washington after Donald Trump’s protestations of innocence in the Russia scandal.

This is the end game:

• Republicans refuse to order an FBI investigation, Kavanaugh slithers onto the high court and the GOP suffers the consequences in a midterm elections in which Kavanaugh is a lightning rod issue.
• Or, Republicans accede to Ford, the FBI investigates her allegation and confirms it, Kavanaugh is outted as the practice liar we know him to be, and he withdraws his nomination.

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From driftglass:

Back in 1973, Mike Royko, the mighty chronicler of all things Chicago, peered into the the murky bottom of a Billy Goat beer stein and divined the future of the city thus:

Daley has already ruled Chicago for longer than most kings reigned in their countries. At this point, many of his loyal subjects view him as more a monarch than an elected official. It seems obvious that he intends to pass the entire city on to his sons, which is a gesture worthy of a king.

And after an interregnum that spanned the clueless (Bilandic) the hapless (Byrne) and thesaurus (Harold!) that is exactly how history unfolded. And so now the real question is, does the Chicago Machine still have enough functional gears and cams and fuel in the tank to put one more Daley back in charge?

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From author John Scalzi:

Both Kavanaugh and Ford are going to testify about it in front of the Senate on Monday, and one would hope under oath. And won’t that be interesting if it is under oath? Because then, if they both stick to their stories, one or the other of them is, flatly, lying.

Alternately, if one wishes to be extraordinarily generous about it, it’s possible that Kavanaugh isn’t lying, precisely, he simply has no memory of the incident. Ford did describe him as being stumble-down drunk at the time. But the thing about that is, he didn’t say “I have no memory of such an incident ever occurring.” He said it never happened. So we’re back to it being an actual lie, in my book.

And here’s the thing for me: Removing all the political aspects of the incident and focusing on the individuals and the incident itself, who are you more likely to believe has a better memory of the incident: The person who was stumble-down drunk when the incident occurred, or the person who was not, and had the event seared into her brain so significantly that it still came up in therapy, three decades later?

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From Wisconsin Conservative James Wigderson:

Editor’s Note: Goodwin has since called to apologize. – James Wigderson 9/17/18

Just when you thought the Left couldn’t get any lower, they can. A self-described “union thug” reached out to RightWisconsin Editor James Wigderson’s minor daughter to criticize him and her school on social media.

Angela Schissler Goodwin, a Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) school teacher who also describes herself as a “MKE liberal,” tracked down Wigderson’s daughter on Facebook and sent her a unsolicited message about her father.

“We are offended by what was said about MPS. We are an MPS family and those insults are reckless generalizations,” Goodwin wrote to James Wigderson’s daughter. “I can’t imagine why he has such mean ideas about a group of people.”

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From The Onion:

DALLAS—In an effort to make himself more appealing to voters, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) reportedly tried to connect with the audience at a candidate forum Tuesday by wearing the bloody, skinned face of a far more handsome man as a mask. “People are really responding to this new, dapper Ted Cruz,” said campaign manager Jeff Roe, noting that recent internal polls show that since Cruz adopted the new look, voters are twice as likely to describe the expressionless, gore-covered incumbent as “trustworthy,” “affable,” or “charming.”

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From Mock Paper Scissors:

“Come, Watson, Come! The game is afoot!,” as Sherlock Holmes says.

Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, and Lisa Murkowski have publicly said that they want to delay to consider the allegations. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on Kavanaugh on Thursday to move his nomination to the full Senate for a vote.

This is the key: Flake is a member of the Judiciary Committee.

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From Max’s Dad:

This picture is all I ever needed to know about Brett Kavanaugh. His refusal to shake the hand of Fred Guttenberg, a man whose child was murdered by a 2nd Amendment enthusiast at Parkland School, is all anyone should need to know about Brett Kavanaugh. To be quite blunt, fuck Brett Kavanaugh and the unicorn he rode in on.

But now a woman has come forward to save the nation.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

Republicans put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court decades ago despite Anita Hill’s credible claims of sexual harassment, and he is still a Supreme Court justice. Which means that if Republicans confirm Kavanaugh, the highest court in the land will be a living symbol that the law does not treat women as full citizens.

That’s simply unacceptable.

What I’d like Senate Republicans to say: They cannot know whether this accusation is true, false or somewhere in between. They do know such an act would disqualify Kavanaugh from this position and from any high office if were true. Kavanaugh (they believe) was otherwise a perfectly acceptable nominee. But the injustice to the entire nation of confirming him if the claim is true — and the message that confirming him would send if it is — outweighs the injustice to him personally if he has been wronged.

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From Tommy Christopher:

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) can’t seem to find time for his own constituents — but he did find time this week to accept an award from a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has officially designated as a hate group.

On Thursday, Nunes spoke at a dinner honoring him as the 2018 “Keeper of the Flame,” an honor bestowed upon him by the extremist anti-Muslim group “The Center for Security Policy.”

The SPLC notes that the organization is a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement in the United States.” The group’s founder, Frank Gaffney Jr., has hosted white supremacist Jared Taylor on his radio show.

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From John Pavlovitz:

Recently a group of Evangelical church leaders released a document called The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel, which has since been electronically co-signed by 7,000 clergy members through America.

Following on the heels of last year’s Nashville Statement, it is yet another attempt by a group of Bible Belt Conservatives to lecture the rest of the nation on how to properly follow Jesus—as if Jesus himself wasn’t fit for the job, as if he needs their help.

I’ll let you read it for yourself, but here’s a spoiler alert:

Like it’s equally pompous brother from Nashville, it too is filled with sanctimony, self-righteous gas-bagging, and all kinds of Bible verse-footnoted religious-speak—designed to serve an iron-clad apologetic of a compassion-free Christianity.

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