|
We Were Brett Kavanaugh's Drinking Buddies. We Don't Think He Should Be Confirmed. |
 |
|
Friday, 05 October 2018 13:33 |
|
Excerpt: "We were college classmates and drinking buddies with Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. In the past week, all three of us decided separately to respond to questions from the media regarding Brett's honesty, or lack thereof."
Brett Kavanaugh. (photo: Reuters)
We Were Brett Kavanaugh's Drinking Buddies. We Don't Think He Should Be Confirmed.
By Charles Ludington, Lynne Brookes and Elizabeth Swisher, The Washington Post
05 October 18
 e were college classmates and drinking buddies with Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. In the past week, all three of us decided separately to respond to questions from the media regarding Brett’s honesty, or lack thereof. In each of our cases, it was his public statements during a Fox News TV interview and his sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that prompted us to speak out.
We each asserted that Brett lied to the Senate by stating, under oath, that he never drank to the point of forgetting what he was doing. We said, unequivocally, that each of us, on numerous occasions, had seen Brett stumbling drunk to the point that it would be impossible for him to state with any degree of certainty that he remembered everything that he did when drunk.
Since coming forward, we each have received numerous angry messages accusing us of attempting to ruin a man’s life because of his drunken antics as a college student. In fact, none of us condemned Brett for his frequent drunkenness. We drank too much in college as well. It is true that Brett acknowledged he sometimes drank “too many beers.” But he also stated that he never drank to the point of blacking out.
By coming forward, each of us has disrupted our own lives and those of our families. As well as navigating the intense media interest, including having news vans and reporters set up in front of the home of one of us, we have received large amounts of hate mail, including threats of violence. We have lost friendships. The work servers of one of us were hacked.
None of this is what we wanted, but we felt it our civic duty to speak the truth and say that Brett lied under oath while seeking to become a Supreme Court justice. That is our one and only message, but it is a significant one. For we each believe that telling the truth, no matter how difficult, is a moral obligation for our nation’s leaders. No one should be able to lie their way onto the Supreme Court. Honesty is the glue that holds together a society of laws. Lies are the solvent that dissolves those bonds.
All of us went to Yale, whose motto is “Lux et Veritas” (Light and Truth). Brett also belonged to a Yale senior secret society called Truth and Courage. We believe that Brett neither tells the former nor embodies the latter. For this reason, we believe that Brett Kavanaugh should not sit on the nation’s highest court.
Charles Ludington, Lynne Brookes and Elizabeth Swisher attended Yale University from 1983 to 1987 with Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh.
 |
|
FOCUS: This Ruling Is Why Conservatives Are So Hopped Up on Brett Kavanaugh |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 05 October 2018 11:32 |
|
Pierce writes: "Why is almost the entire conservative apparatus hellbent on putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court despite the fact that he is a very big liar who lies a lot, occasionally when his lies are 'hallowed by oath,' as the law books say?"
Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and Vice President Mike Pence. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
This Ruling Is Why Conservatives Are So Hopped Up on Brett Kavanaugh
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
05 October 18
They want—and need—to outnumber people like Judge Chen in the federal judiciary.
hy is almost the entire conservative apparatus hellbent on putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court despite the fact that he is a very big liar who lies a lot, occasionally when his lies are "hallowed by oath," as the law books say? Why are conservative voters so het up about the federal judiciary generally? So things like this don't happen any more. From The Los Angeles Times:
The ruling late Wednesday afternoon will relieve immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan from the threat of deportation. It came in response to a class-action lawsuit alleging that government officials approached their decisions about TPS with a political agenda, ignored facts and were motivated by racism. Administration officials deny those allegations, saying the program was never intended to provide a long-term reprieve...
"Absent injunctive relief, TPS beneficiaries and their children indisputably will suffer irreparable harm and great hardship,” Chen wrote. “Many have U.S.-born children; those may be faced with the Hobson’s choice of bringing their children with them (and tearing them away from the only country and community they have known) or splitting their families apart.” Chen said the government had failed to prove that any harm would come from maintaining the status quo.
Not only that, but Judge Chen also decided to explain the obvious motivation behind the administration*'s decision to send largely brown earthquake victims and refugees from war zones back down south where they came from.
“President Trump harbors an animus against non-white, non-European aliens which influenced his decision to end the TPS designation."
From The Washington Post:
At the same time, he said there were “serious questions as to whether a discriminatory purpose was a motivating factor” in the administration’s decision, which would violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. He cited statements by President Trump denigrating Mexicans, Muslims, Haitians and Africans, including his January remark about “people from shithole countries” and his June 2017 comments stating that 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS.”
The plaintiffs “have raised serious questions whether the action taken” by Homeland Security officials “was influenced by the White House and based on animus against non-white, non-European immigrants in violation of Equal Protection guaranteed by the Constitution,” Chen wrote. “The issues are at least serious enough to preserve the status quo.”
Alas, we all know this drama all too well. Sooner or later, Judge Chen's quite logical decision to hold the president* accountable for the policies that inevitably spring from his bone-deep bigotry will run headlong into some Federalist Society clone who has supped for a decade or so at the bounteous banquet of wingnut welfare, and who understands quite well what he now owes to the people who have spread before him this magnificent largesse—in short, a safe hack who is in the bag.
This person either will find a misplaced comma that allows him to overturn Judge Chen, or he will invent some improvisational konztitooshunal hocus-pocus that only he understands—hello, John Roberts, and the "equal sovereignty of the states"—and that is designed only for the specific political circumstances of the moment. And, poof! Back to the gangland killing fields of El Salvador. It is entirely possible that, if Judge Chen gets extremely lucky, and his injunction even makes it all the way up to the Supreme Court, that Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh will be the one who does the deed. And won't that complete the circle in a lovely way?
|
|
|
FOCUS: A Letter to White Women Who Support Brett Kavanaugh |
|
|
Friday, 05 October 2018 11:00 |
|
Ensler writes: "On Oct. 2, I watched the President of the United States mock a woman who had recounted the trauma of being sexually assaulted in front of the world, on live television."
Playwright Eve Ensler. (photo: Getty)
A Letter to White Women Who Support Brett Kavanaugh
By Eve Ensler, TIME
05 October 18
 n Oct. 2, I watched the President of the United States mock a woman who had recounted the trauma of being sexually assaulted in front of the world, on live television. And as he did so, a recent poll rattled around my head. The survey found that, while white men regularly supported Kavanaugh the most, white women also did so significantly more than Hispanic or black people overall. For example, 45% of white women said Kavanaugh should be confirmed, compared to 30% of Hispanic people and 11% of black people. Like so much of these recent weeks, it made me reflect. But even more so, it made me want to write to those women. Not lecture them. Not denigrate them. Just simply to speak to them directly and to try to explain my feelings. This is what I wrote:
Dear white women who support Brett Kavanaugh,
Last night when I saw Donald Trump mock Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, I couldn’t help focusing on the women behind him who cheered and laughed. I felt like I was falling into a familiar nightmare. It compelled me to reach out to you.
When I was a child my father sexually abused and beat me. My mother did not protect me. She sided with my father, just like these women sided with Donald Trump, and I understand why. She sided with him because he was the breadwinner. She sided with him because of her need to survive. She sided with him because the reality of what was happening in front of her was so terrible, it was easier not to see.
She sided with him because she was brought up never to question a man. She was taught to serve men and make men happy. She was trained not to believe women. It was only much later, after my father died, that she was able to acknowledge the truth of my childhood and to ask for my forgiveness. It was only then, too late, that she was able to see how she had sacrificed her daughter for security and comfort. She used those words. I was her “sacrifice.”
Some people when they look at this video of women laughing at Dr. Ford, will see callousness. I see distancing. I see denial. I have worked on ending violence against women for 20 years. I have traveled this country many times. I have sat with women of all ages and political persuasions. I remember the first performances of my play The Vagina Monologues in Oklahoma City, when half the women in the audience came up to tell me they had been raped or battered. Most of them whispered it to me, and often I was the first and only person they had told. Until that moment, they had found a way to normalize it. Expect it. Accept it. Deny it.
I don’t believe you want to have to choose your sons and your husbands over your daughters. I don’t believe you want the pain that was inflicted on us inflicted on future generations.
I know the risk many of you take in coming out to say you believe a woman over a man. It means you might then have to recognize and believe your own experience. If one out of three women in the world have been raped or beaten, it must mean some of you have had this experience. To believe another woman means having to touch into the pain and fear and sorrow and rage of your own experience and that sometimes feels unbearable. I know because it took me years to come out of my own denial and to break with my perpetrator, my father. To speak the truth that risked upending the comfort of my very carefully constructed life. But I can tell you that living a lie is living half a life. It was only after telling my story that I knew happiness and freedom.
I know the risk others of you face who have witnessed those you love suffer the traumatic after-effects of violence and those who worry for both your sons and daughters that may someday face this violence
I write to you because we need you, the way I once needed my mother. We need you to stand with women who are breaking the silence in spite of their terror and shame. I believe inside the bodies of some of those women who laughed at that rally were other impulses and feelings they weren’t expressing.
Here is why I believe you should take this stand with me. Violence against women destroys our souls. It annihilates our sense of self. It numbs us. It separates us from our bodies. It is the tool used to keep us second-class citizens. And if we don’t address it, it can lead to depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, overeating and suicide. It makes us believe we are not worthy of happiness.
It took my mother 40 years to see what her denial has done and to apologize to me. I don’t think you want to apologize to your daughters forty years from now. Stop the ascension of a man who is angry, aggressive, and vengeful and could very well be a sexual assaulter. Time is short. Call your senators. Stop laughing and start fighting.
With all my love,
Eve
|
|
If This Isn't a Sham Investigation, I Don't Know What Is |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 05 October 2018 08:13 |
|
Reich writes: "As the nation slept, the White House announced that the FBI has completed its investigation into sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
If This Isn't a Sham Investigation, I Don't Know What Is
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
05 October 18
 s the nation slept, the White House announced that the FBI has completed its investigation into sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. Agents were not allowed to interview dozens of people who could provide additional information, including Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford themselves.
The report will now go to the Senate, where McConnell will only allow senators to view the report in a secure location. He also refuses to release the findings, what little they might offer, to the public. Before the investigation was even complete, McConnell began the process for a vote on Kavanaugh.
If this isn't a sham investigation, I don't know what is. In less than a week, Trump, McConnell, and Kavanaugh have managed to make a mockery of the Senate, the FBI, and the Supreme Court. Beyond that, this charade is an insult to the American people.
|
|
ive days ago Dems & “liberals” did the same old thing, claiming some empty “victory” when Flake feigned “shame, and then foolishly placing their hopes in the FBI - THE FBI! - doing an “investigation.” When is our side going to wake up and start FIGHTING? Stop hoping & start acting!
