The Kavanaugh situation - today's thoughts

1.) Ronan Farrow, who had established himself as a good investigative journalist, has badly discredited himself with the New Yorker piece, which NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post took a pass on.

2.) Ramirez huddling with her leftist lawyer for several days to "assess her memories" is about as lame as it gets.

3.) This, several paragraphs in:

One of the male classmates who Ramirez said egged on Kavanaugh denied any memory of the party. “I don’t think Brett would flash himself to Debbie, or anyone, for that matter,” he said. Asked why he thought Ramirez was making the allegation, he responded, “I have no idea.” The other male classmate who Ramirez said was involved in the incident commented, “I have zero recollection.”

In a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved in the incident, the wife of a third male student she said was involved, and three other classmates, Dino Ewing, Louisa Garry, and Dan Murphy, disputed Ramirez’s account of events: “We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not. The behavior she describes would be completely out of character for Brett. In addition, some of us knew Debbie long after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett’s Supreme Court nomination was pending. Editors from the New Yorker contacted some of us because we are the people who would know the truth, and we told them that we never saw or heard about this.”

4.) Ford says she's afraid to fly. Did she stay put in Hawaii the whole time she was attending the state university there?

5.) She wanted to stall in order for creatures like Ramirez and Avenatti to enter the fray.

6.) Grassley's effort to accommodate Ford was impressive last week. Give her enough rope. But giving her until Thursday of this week was a conciliatory gesture too far.

7.) Michael Avenatti's charge of high-school-rape-gangs is not only ludicrous but should result in his disbarring.

8.) Democrats are savages. They have dog vomit where normal people have souls. They think it's a hoot that they are scarring Kavanaugh's children for life, destroying our social fabric, our Constitutional order, and anything recognizable as the United States of America.

9.) This is all about protecting the "right" to rip people's limbs from their torsos and vacuum the brains out of their skulls. That right must be protected because leftist women resent being of the gender with bodies in which people gestate. They see God's sacred design for them as an inconvenience that gives them a more limited set of options than men have.

10.) Senate Republicans have to confirm Kavanaugh. If they don't, they will face a bloodbath in November. They'll be living up to the image of fecklessness Pubs have had for decades. They'll be showing that they really don't understand that this is war of the most ruthless and brutal sort. LITD has always found and still finds Donald Trump objectionable (see next post - the one on tariffs), but listen up, you dweeby little twits, this is how we got him.

The embarrassing silliness to which identity politics inevitably leads

Try to keep the layers of this mess sorted out:

Approximately 300 people shut down Castro street on Saturday January 17th during the night when most people are going to bars. Activist's chose the Castro "because it is a space dominated by white middle class men, and is symbolic of the racial divide within the LGBT community and gentrification in San Francisco in general." 
Activists also wanted to draw attention to the fact that the Castro supports LGBT related organizations that are generally "apathetic" towards black and brown people.  
The protesters demands are:  
"1. Pressure San Francisco LGBT Center, Horizons Foundation, Equality CA, Human Rights Campaign, all mainstream LGBT organizations to take concrete action in support of black lives 

2. Donate money to efforts that support queer and trans black leadership including TGI Justice Project, Trans Women of Color Collective, and BreakOUT! 

3. Find alternatives to calling the police to keep our communities safe 

4. Establish safe spaces in the Castro for queer and trans black people

How does one "establish safe spaces" in public without involving the police?

How big is the "queer and trans black" demographic?

Just who is supposed to donate this money and how much?

So many questions!

A sane voice at Harvard

There are a few.  One such is Professor Barthollet:

Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet is speaking out against the university's new campus sexual assault policies, calling the federal government’s treatment of college campuses “madness.”

Last week, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found Harvard's Law School in violation of Title IX, the 1972 Education Amendments provision now being used to require colleges to adjudicate sexual assault outside the criminal courts. OCR determined that Harvard Law had essentially been providing accused students too much due process, and the school adopted new policies to rectify that supposed error.

“The federal government’s decision that Harvard Law School violated Title IX represents nothing more than the government’s flawed view of Title IX law,” Bartholet wrote in an e-mail to the Wall Street Journal’s law blog.
“[OCR], which issued the decision, is not the ultimate decision-maker on law. The courts are responsible for interpreting the law,” Bartholet continued. “And I trust that the courts will eventually reject the federal government’s current views.”
Bartholet added that courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have to date recognized due process rights for the accuser as well as the accused in sexual assault cases.

“I believe that history will demonstrate the federal government’s position to be wrong, that our society will look back on this time as a moment of madness, and that Harvard University will be deeply shamed at the role it played in simply caving to the government’s position,” Bartholet concluded. 

Following OCR’s determination, Harvard Law will lower the burden of proof to the “preponderance of evidence” standard. This means that faculty adjudicating a claim of sexual assault will only need to be 50.01 percent sure the accuser is telling the truth in order to brand the accused a rapist for life.
Harvard Law will also be required to reopen all sexual harassment and sexual assault accusations made in the previous two school years — meaning students who had previously been acquitted will now be retried in an effort to find more of them guilty.

Pick the target, freeze it and attack it.  Straight out of Alinsky.