Monday roundup

From the I'm-so-clueless-about-what's-going-on-in-my-nation-that-I-reflexively-submit-to-the-identity-politics-jackboots file:

Scott Kelly, a retired U.S. Navy Captain, NASA engineer, and veteran of four spaceflights, was brought low on Sunday by those possessed of neither his accomplishments nor talents for the crime of advocating Churchillian generosity of spirit. “Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My apologies,” the astronaut wrote after what must have been a withering assault on social media. “I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support.”

This is only the most recent example of a menacing phenomenon. In the name of historical literacy, an absurd form of pseudo-academic reductionism has become the preferred means by which we “interrogate” Western (and only Western) history. We are told that we must abandon discretion, compartmentalization, and basic good sense if we are to be taken seriously by the self-appointed arbiters of such things. Nuance is for the naïve. Sensibility is found only in simplicity.

The bottom line on the notion that Kavanaugh will be "damaged goods" as a SCOTUS justice, based on how Clarence Thomas's stint on the bench has played out:

. . . let’s pause for a moment and consider what that “asterisk” next to Thomas’ name actually means. I can sum it up for you in one word: nothing. Zip, zero, nada. Are Thomas’ votes in Supreme Court decisions measured as counting for less than one each? (Dare I say… two thirds?) No, they are not. Are decisions where he’s taken part in a 5-4 split somehow less final in the nation’s system of laws? Nope. He’s been on the bench and voting for just shy of 27 years, and each and every one of those votes was recorded just the same as those cast by every other member of the court.

Barring a complete breakdown of our political ecosystem or some shocking new revelation involving provable illegal conduct, Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court to stay. And at the age of 53, barring any tragic health issues and with the grace of God, he’ll likely be there for the next quarter of a century or more. Those camping out on the steps of the Supreme Court and rending their garments in grief should probably come to terms with the idea.

American Thinker piece by Thomas Lifson entitled "Liberal Pope Francis Has Lost the Most Liberal Weekly in Europe":

You might think that the enthusiastic support Pope Francis has offered for environmentalism, open borders, and the normalization of homosexual behavior would buy him support from liberal media. But Der Spiegel, the most important weekly magazine in Europe, has turned against the Roman Catholic Prelate with a cover story that proclaims (auf Deutsch) the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not lie,” with a subhead: “The Pope and the Catholic Church in their greatest crisis.”

Facebook is censoring ads for the new movie about Kermit Gosnell.

Great piece by Daniel Gelernter at NRO on a San Francisco Symphony performance at Carnegie Hall that included pieces by Gershwin and how it offers an opportunity to revisit the question of whether a pop tunesmith can also be a serious composer:

Gershwin is rarely performed by today’s leading orchestras. Howard Hirsch hit the nail on the head in his program notes for the evening: He observed that the musical establishment was profoundly irritated that “a more or less self-taught Broadway tunesmith presumed to write ambitious concert works” and that these works were “boisterously successful.”

Gershwin’s music is at once beautiful, exhilarating, and totally original. He captured the essence of a young, enthusiastic, but thoughtful America better than any other artist. He deserves to be considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. One could make a compelling case that he is the greatest composer of the 20th century, but music buffs and scholars tend to laugh: Gershwin, they say, is not “serious” music.

When did popularity become a strike against seriousness? Schubert performed his lieder at parties, and Bach played the harpsichord at Zimmermann’s Coffee House. How did we reach a point where music, to win scholarly approval, must be unpleasant and, to an untrained ear, unlistenable? It is funny to think that the same music buffs who praise contemporary composers for their iconoclastic rule-breaking also mock Gershwin for his supposed ignorance of classical symphonic structure. Even Leonard Bernstein once wrote, in an embarrassing screed, that Gershwin’s “nice” tunes were not “real composition” — but that they were so enjoyable he loved them anyway. Very generous.

The problem with Gershwin is that nobody else could do it: No one could write like Gershwin without being a grade-A, 100 percent, non-certified natural musical genius. So the academic music world hated Gershwin, and instead chose Schoenberg and Webern and, later, Cage and Glass as their role models: When music is based on a theoretical concept, rather than how it sounds, suddenly anyone can do it. This was the appeal of rule-based composition “systems” like Schoenberg’s terrible twelve-tones. This is why the only thing you’ll learn about Gershwin in a university music program is that he was Schoenberg’s occasional tennis partner.

Almost everyone who attends an academic composition program really wants, more than anything on earth, to be a composer. When these students discover that they’re simply not composers — that they haven’t got what 100 years ago would have been the obvious requisites of talent and imagination and a capacity for melody and harmony — there are two possible courses: They can admit defeat gracefully and move on to a different career. Or they can spend the rest of their lives pretending to be what they wish they were. Ever since the invention of conceptual music, the vast majority of failed composers have chosen the second and less honorable course, hiding their lack of talent behind a rulebook that proclaims talent no longer matters.

Brazil shifts abruptly to a populist-right political footing:

Far-right Congressman and former Army captain Jair Bolsonaro won nearly half the votes in Brazil's first-round presidential election on Sunday, as voters' anger at corruption drove a major shift to the right in Latin America's largest nation.

In what is likely to be a deeply polarizing runoff, Bolsonaro, an outspoken apologist for Brazil's 1964-1985 military dictatorship, will now face leftist Fernando Haddad, the former mayor of Sao Paulo, in a second round of voting on Oct. 28.

Dubbed a "Tropical Trump" by some pundits because of his nationalist agenda and anti-establishment tirades, Bolsonaro was swept from the political margins this year by a wave of antipathy toward scandal-plagued traditional parties.

His promise of a brutal crackdown on graft and crime have resonated with voters in the world's fifth most populous country, which registered a record 63,880 violent deaths in 2017. Bolsonaro has pledged to roll back gun controls and make it easier for police to kill.

With just three weeks until the runoff, Bolsonaro holds a commanding lead. He won 46.3 percent of valid ballots, far ahead of Haddad's 29 percent but short of the outright majority needed to avoid a second round, electoral authorities said.

In a seismic shift in Brazilian politics, Bolsonaro's once-tiny Social Liberal Party (PSL) was poised to become the second-largest force in Congress after legislative elections also held on Sunday, giving a boost to his agenda of slashing taxes and state involvement in the economy.

With no backing from major parties and little funding, Bolsonaro relied on his skilful use of social media during the campaign. He gained momentum after a near-fatal stabbing at a rally one month ago that kept him from campaigning.

"This was a great victory, considering we had no television time, a party that is still very small with no campaign money and I was in hospital for 30 days," he said in video streamed live over social media. "We have to believe in our Brazil. We have to remain mobilized."

I think repealing the 17th Amendment is a good idea, but I think Steve Berman's argument at The Resurgent merits consideration:

I think it would merely take the circus and $10 million (average) cost of Senate campaigns and move them to the individual state legislatures. It could, in theory, make your local state legislative races as nasty as some Congressional races have become. It could pour money (like the $50 million that went into the Handel/Ossoff special election in my home district) into local races in a way we have never seen.

In short, I think it's too late to even consider taking the new political landscape and trying to roll it back into a more pastoral time where state legislatures operated in relative calm (press-wise). A new crop of Wendy "Abortion Barbie" Davises and other demagogues and issue hogs would then dominate the race to get the coveted Senate seat. I think it would be a disaster, but YMMV.

Maybe in 1946, under Harry Truman, this idea could have worked. Not in 2018 under Donald Trump. And likely, never afterward. Some things have have their window of opportunity close, and the idea of states once again appointing Senators is one of them.

I'm not completely convinced, though. You know us conservatives. We're not too big on arguments of the it's-too-late-to-go-back variety.

A little gem of pure truth from the mouth of an identity-politics jackboot

In a Guardian article, the tone of which indicates that its author found herself scratching her head at the jumble of findings from oh-so-statistically-rigorous studies and various expressions of opinion from various sectors, we find that Republican women voters tend to be more concerned with due process than statistics about sexual assault.

It's pretty objective. She even includes observations from conservative writer Stephanie Gutman, who  featured prominently in a recent LITD post. Be assured, though, it skews heavily toward those of the gosh-darn-it-what-does-it-take-for-women-to-behave-monolithically school. It even gets into how the Most Equal Comrade won solid majorities of the black vote in his presidential races, but, gosh darn it, Madame Bleachbit lost out on the white women's vote in 2016. There's also the delving into demographic data such as income levels, education levels, marital status, etc.

But here's the absolute money line:

The women’s movement is, among other things, a study in all the ways women are divided from one another.

Gee, ya think? Half the population of the human species may have some variety within itself as to viewpoints on culture and public policy, and that make even show up in a left-skewing movement made up of that half of the population. Who could have figured?

This line is noteworthy as well:

. . . more than 80% of black moms are the breadwinners, according tofindings from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Another way of putting that is "there's a lot of male abandonment of families going on among people who happen to be black," a phenomenon that Larry Elder, Star Parker and others have stressed is key to understanding the high homicide rate among black males (but that is another story).

And I thought the business about how the more Christian a marriage is, the more likely a woman is to vote Republican.

This merits a big "well duh" as well. The Bible is where humankind gets its proper understanding of what a marriage is. All the leftist policy prescriptions for everything from "reproductive choice" to encouraging society to create ever more child care (and have government fund it whenever possible) run counter to that instruction.

The article ends on a hopeful (from a leftist point of view) note, as have a number of other leftist pieces I've perused so far this morning, but with the Very Stable Genius's poll number over 50 and a unity among Republicans not seen in decades, I'm not sure how warranted it is.

But the idea that people - people with vaginas - might come to conclusions leftists don't expect when they think for themselves seems awfully hard for the jackboots to get their brains around.

How savage are these wild animals?

This savage:

A pair of activist comedians followed around Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade, lobbing hostile questions at him on Friday. If you are a public figure after all, you may get questions with or without a camera when you are walking down a public street (in fact, Mediaite has used a roving paparazzi in the past as well).

But they didn’t stop there.

Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler, who are known as “The Good Liars,” then trailed Kilmeade into a NYC subway and encouraged fellow passengers to jeer at him in what increasingly felt like a potentially perilous situation for the Fox host.

It started with Selvig posing for a selfie with a smiling Kilmeade. But it was clearly a set-up, with Selvig then asking Kilmeade if he was “accused of sexually harassing Gretchen Carlson.” It turned ugly from there.

Selvig follows Kilmeade through Midtown, repeatedly calling after him, and noting that his “backpack is on crooked.”

He eventually follows Kilmeade onto the subway where Stiefler makes an appearance, announcing the Fox News host to the crowded car.

“Hey everyone, this is Brian Kilmeade, he says lots of weird, kinda racisty stuff on the news a lot,” Stiefler says.

“This is the closest personal adviser to Donald Trump, the Fox & Friendshost Brian Kilmeade,” Selvig adds. “If you have anything you want Donald Trump to say or do, tell this guy cause he’s the only person in America that Donald Trump listens to.” (While it’s true that Fox & Friendsis the president’s morning fare, Kilmeade is the one host of the three who has been willing to criticize and/or question the president’s actions.)

One straphanger yells “He’s a career criminal, he’s a traitor, he should go to hell!”

“Brian did you get that?” Selvig asks.

“Stop grabbing pussies!” a man yells, echoing Trump.

While Kilmeade cooly ignores the jeers, he was effectively trapped in a subway car with two people encouraging random New Yorkers to go after him. To understand the potential safety issue, those who lean left should just substitute two right leaning comedians stalking and heckling Rachel Maddow or Stephanie Ruhle, in a more right leaning town, in a confined public space, encouraging them to insult and jeer at them.

The duo then follows Kilmeade off the subway, and to a Jamba Juice where Selvig offers Kilmeade $10 to tell Trump to resign on Fox & Friends. Kilmeade, by this point on the phone, continues to ignore the badgering. Fortunately no one got hurt, although the incident may lead Kilmeade, or any other public political figure, to think twice about taking public transportation.

How long do these thugs think they can keep ratcheting this stuff up without it, you know, changing not just in degree but in kind?

 

 

 

He's confirmed - very brief initial thoughts

About to take a Saturday afternoon drive through the hill country with my wife and find some place to stop in for something to drink and eat, but given that we just witnessed history, a word in real time seems warranted.

What strikes me most is the savagery of the leftists in the gallery. They know the rules. Members of the public are to keep their mouths shut and watch the proceedings. These creatures were completely out of control, a frenzied mob. They were behaving like wild animals. They interrupted the voting process several times.

It's an encapsulation of the foreseeable future. The climate in our nation is not going to get less ugly.

With that in mind, it's gratifying to the core of my being to see Republicans more unified than they have been in perhaps decades. At this point, Donald Trump's temperament is far from the central issue on the Republicans' plate - or the nation's. The evil that is the modern Left is.

The battle plan is clear: pray, vote, defend first principles, and find a way to participate civically.

I don't know if post-America can once again become the United States of America, but on days like this, I am encouraged in believing that it's possible.

A whole lot of women aren't buying the solidarity-with-the-sisterhood idea

Stephanie Gutman, opining in USA Today:

We are furious at the people purporting to speak for women, furious that what should have been an ordinary parsing of evidence (what little there is after 36 years) was turned into a Kabuki theater campaign ad for the Democratic Party, stressing their trope that the GOP is conducting a so-called war on women.

Sixty-nine percent of Republican women, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll released Monday, said they favor confirming Kavanaugh. As for anecdotal evidence, I know what my friends and relatives are saying and what the several women who called into Hugh Hewitt’s radio show said this week.

Many conservative women detest the McCarthyite tone of the proceedings; we feel sickened by the sight of crowds of college girls ripping up pro-Kavanaugh posters; we are worried as mobs chant, “We believe survivors!” (What if Ford is not truly a “survivor”? Don’t we have to establish whether she’s a survivor first?)

The theater turned us off, but it was a kind of a last straw — after years of pussy hats and #MeToo and college kangaroo courts. We don’t buy the larger message about a GOP “war on women.” We know these are crude scare tactics designed to get our votes. But Democrats are making a huge miscalculation. We don’t vote on reproductive policy alone, and many of us voted for President Donald Trump because at least he talked about taxes and regulations and eliminating government agencies — things we knew would affect the American economy, not just our own jobs but those of our husbands, sons and brothers.

Perhaps - although this may be too much to hope for, given how far gone post-America is - one upside (along with, hopefully, Kavanaugh's confirmation), namely, that people will quit thinking that they have particular public-policy interests based on their demographic classification.

Dismayed but not surprised

Murkowski is publicly announcing the she's a thumbs-down on Kavanaugh.

Streiff at Red State sizes up the two goofy leftist notions that have motivated the Alaska Senator:

Murkowski seems to have bought into a couple of nutty ideas. First, that because some women, somewhere, have been victims of sexual assault, then Brett Kavanaugh, bearing the Original Sin of Maleness, must be denied a seat on the Supreme Court. The perverseness of that logic cannot be exaggerated. It can and will be applied to literally every job in the nation.

The second idea is that Kavanaugh’s nomination damages the credibility of the Supreme Court presumably because being the subject of an orchestrated smear campaign stains the office to which you have been nominated.

NRO writer Alexandra DeSanctis's tweet about it is also spot on:

I’m highly disturbed by this notion that it’s just to punish Kavanaugh for other men’s sins. There’s no legitimate reason to believe he’s committed any sexual misconduct, but half the country wants to make some kind of cultural sacrifice out of him.

One expects identity-politics nonsense out of Democrats, but Republicans don't wear it well.

Then again, she's been ate up with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome for some time.


Gonna be interesting to follow her polling numbers.

 

This chick must really be invested in post-Americans continuing to be able to vacuum the brains out of people's skulls

Here at LITD, we're big on fealty to principle. The principle that Heidi Heidtkamp has chosen as a hill to die on may not be a principle we're cool with, but she doesn't seem to be afraid of the die-on-it part:

A new poll shows Republican challenger Rep. Kevin Cramer leading Sen. Heidi Heitkamp by a 10- point margin, with North Dakotans overwhelmingly in favor of confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Losing a race in North Dakota would make it significantly more difficult for Democrats to retake the Senate. 

The poll, from Strategic Research Associates and North Dakota's NBC affiliate, shows Cramer opening up a 51 percent to 41 percent lead over the Democratic incumbent.

The poll also finds North Dakotans support the confirmation of Kavanaugh by a 60 percent to 27 percent margin. Furthermore, the survey found that at 21 percent, more people rated Kavanaugh as their top concern than any other single issue.

Suit yourself, toots. As long as the Pubs afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome take their meds for keeping the symptoms at bay, the vote is going to work out in a way that pleases God.

Where the real collusion has been all along

From The Hill today:

Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm.

That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firmFusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump and Moscow were colluding to hijack the presidential election.

The dossier, though mostly unverified, was then used by the FBI as the main evidence seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in the final days of the campaign.

The revelation was confirmed both in contemporaneous evidence and testimony secured by a joint investigation by Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight committees, my source tells me.

It means the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump’s opposition — the DNC, Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election, rather than some conspiracy between Putin and Trump,” a knowledgeable source told me.

Baker was interviewed by lawmakers behind closed doors on Wednesday. Sources declined to divulge his testimony, other than to say it confirmed other evidence about the contact between the Perkins Coie law firm and the FBI.

The sources also said Baker’s interview broke new ground both about the FBI’s use of news media in 2016 and 2017 to further the Trump case and about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s conversations in spring 2017 regarding possible use of a body wire to record Trump.

“The interview was one of the most productive we had and it opened up many new investigative leads,” one source said.

Another said Baker could not answer some questions about FBI media contacts, citing an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department inspector general into alleged illegal leaks, during and after the election, about the Trump collusion probe and other matters.

These revelations illustrate anew how much the FBI and Justice Department have withheld from the public about their collaboration and collusion with clearly partisan elements of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, Fusion and Steele, that were trying to defeat Trump.

The growing body of evidence that the FBI used mostly politically-motivated, unverified intelligence from an opponent to justify spying on the GOP nominee’s campaign — just weeks before Election Day — has prompted a growing number of Republicans to ask President Trump to declassify the rest of the FBI’s main documents in the Russia collusion case.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), veteran investigator Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and many others have urged the president to act on declassification even as FBI and Justice Department have tried to persuade the president to keep documents secret.

Ryan has said he believes the declassification will uncover potential FBI abuses of the FISA process. Jordan said he believes there is strong evidence the bureau misled the FISA court. Nunes has said the FBI intentionally hid exculpatory evidence from the judges.

And Meadows told The Hill’s new morning television show, Rising, on Wednesday that there is evidence the FBI had sources secretly record members of the Trump campaign.

“There’s a strong suggestion that confidential human sources actually taped members within the Trump campaign,” Meadows told Hill.TV hosts Krystal Ball and Ned Ryun.

Baker, like Page, Stzrok, McCabe and, of course the enigmatic James Comey, is now gone from the FBI. (He's at the left-of-center Brookings Institution.) But the repair job left to the agency by these people is momentous.

The guy who asked for the FBI investigation says it offers no corroboration

From the Senator's own mouth:

Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), a key swing Republican vote, said Thursday that a new FBI report on Brett Kavanaugh has failed to corroborate Christine Blasey Ford's allegation of sexual assault against the Supreme Court nominee.

Flake said there was nothing in the FBI’s supplementary background check to corroborate the claims from Ford, which threw Kavanaugh’s nomination into turmoil starting last month.

The Arizona Republican said he agrees with fellow GOP Sen. Susan Collins(Maine) in viewing the FBI report as "thorough." He also said it failed to back up Ford’s claims that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a house gathering in 1982, when both were in high school.

“I think Susan Collins was quoted saying it was very thorough but no new corroborative information came out of it. That’s accurate,” Flake told reporters after reviewing the FBI report in the secure compartmented information facility in the Capitol Visitor Center.

“I wanted this pause; we’ve had this pause. We’ve had the professionals, the FBI, determine — given the scope that we gave them, current credible allegations — to go and do their review, which they’ve done,” Flake said.

“Thus far we’ve seen no new credible corroboration, no new corroboration at all,” he said.

Collins separately told reporters that the FBI investigation "appears to be a very thorough investigation" and said she planned to go read the full report later. 

Flake, Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) are the three Republican senators who are undecided on Kavanaugh. 

So how about it, Senator? You'll be retiring soon. This would be your big chance for the historical record to show that you went out with a demonstration of principle and backbone.

Oh, and Flake's bud Chris Coons says he doesn't think the FBI interviewed enough people.

Do yourself another favor regarding how history is going to view you, Senator Flake, and knock off the bromance with the Freedom-Hater.

The downside of Amazon's new $15 / hour minimum wage

The announcement certainly got Freedom-Haters like Bernie Sanders all gooey in the britches, but are they aware of this part of it?

Amazon garnered praise for raising the minimum wage for its hourly workers to $15 yesterday, but the widely-publicized move also came at the expense of monthly bonuses and stock options. The company explained its decision to shift to a new stock purchase program in the announcement blog post yesterday, citing that hourly employees preferred the “predictability and immediacy of cash to RSUs,” or restricted stock units, but the post doesn’t mention the loss of monthly incentives, which Bloomberg reported earlier today.

Several Amazon warehouse employees have criticized the move, stating they would actually be losing thousands in incentive pay. Currently, warehouse workers get two shares of Amazon stock when they’re hired ($1,952.76 per share as of writing), and an additional stock option each year. After the changes take effect, the RSU program will be phased out for stocks that vest in 2020 and 2021, and it will be replaced with a direct stock purchase plan by the end of next year.

An Amazon warehouse worker told The Verge via email that the news was devastating to fulfillment employees, many of whom depend on their RSU and VCP (variable compensation pay, a performance-based monthly bonus program) incentives on top of their hourly wages. VCP incentives, which are dependent on good attendance and hitting productivity targets, could get Amazon workers an 8 percent monthly bonus, and a 16 percent bonus during the peak November and December seasons.

There's only so much budgeted for labor costs, folks, and you expressed a preference for predictability and immediacy.

Brett Kavanaugh's character, in the words of women who actually know him well

Let the record show this:

Meghan McCaleb was a year behind Kavanaugh in school and met him her freshman year of high school. She says she knew him because he had dated a few of her friends, as well as her older sister for a few months. “I just remember that he was always so kind to her. My parents really liked him, and he was so polite to all of us,” McCaleb says.

Even though Kavanaugh and her sister broke up after three months, all three of them stayed friends. “It always struck me what a great guy he was,” she adds. “There were other boyfriends we had who we never saw again. But it was different with Brett.”

“I can count on one hand the number of people from high school that I’d stand up for in such a vocal way, and Brett is one of them,” McCaleb says. “I have complete faith in his character. I absolutely stand by him.”

Julie DeVol is also one of the women Kavanaugh referenced in his testimony, and she tells National Review they became best friends after they met in 1980 through a group of high-school friends. “We used to get each other dates to dances and different events, but he and I never went to dances together because we were like brother and sister,” she says.

DeVol said several times throughout our conversation that Kavanaugh was always the patient, responsible one in their friend group. “He was always there taking care of us,” she says. “I was a year younger, and he was like my big brother. He wouldn’t let any guys mess around with you. If anybody was drinking, he would be the one taking care of you. Not everyone in his friend group was like that, but he always was.”

And that was true all the time, not just when their friends were spending time together on weekends or at parties. “He used to always help me with my homework over the phone,” DeVol adds. “My mom would say we couldn’t talk on the phone until I had done my homework, so he’d walk me through my math problems and other work so that we could talk.” 

Suzanne Matan — another of the women Kavanaugh mentioned in his testimony and who sat behind him during the hearing — met him in 1980 when she entered private Catholic school her sophomore year. She agrees with DeVol that he was always known among their friends for being responsible and careful. “You always have one in every class who sort of looks out for everyone,” she explains. “He stood out among us as being the responsible guy, the smart guy.”
She has a specific memory of when she realized in high school what kind of person Kavanaugh is. “One time he had asked me out to dinner, and it started to snow fairly heavily,” Matan says. “His mother called my mother and said Brett wanted to use the car to take me out to dinner, but his mother and mine were both worried the roads might get bad.”

But Kavanaugh was insistent that he had promised to take her to dinner, and he intended to do so, snow or not. He convinced their parents that he’d drive carefully and bring Suzanne home early. “He took me out, brought me home, and walked me right to the door and said good night,” Matan recalls. “That’s how I remember Brett. The guy that came and picked you up, you had a nice conversation, he brought you home and took you to the door. The guy who kept his promises.”

According to women who have known him later in life, too, Kavanaugh’s character and integrity have remained consistent regardless of age or circumstance. Monica Mastal has known Kavanaugh for several decades because her siblings were in school with him, they’ve remained lifelong friends, and she also worked with him in the White House. Their children attend the same parish school, Kavanaugh coached her daughter in basketball at the school, and she testified for him before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I worked with him briefly at the office of independent counsel when I was in my young twenties, when I was an intern during law school,” Mastal says. “I was just an intern and he was an attorney, but he was always very friendly and supportive. He was kind to everyone on staff, whether you were an intern or FBI agent. It didn’t matter.”

Anita McBride also worked with Kavanaugh in the White House, under the George W. Bush administration. She’s known him since 2001, when she was working as acting director of White House personnel for the transition period, which meant working closely with Kavanaugh, who was an associate counsel in the White House at the time.

“There were things I’d send to him for review, and he was always a very responsive colleague,” McBride explains. “A lot of the time we’d work long hours, and he’d walk papers down to my office late, late at night, just to be sure that he got to them in the same day that I had sent them to him. I very much appreciated that, his responsiveness and collegiality as a fellow staff member.” 

McBride says Kavanaugh was widely respected in the White House, especially when he later served as staff secretary to President Bush and managed decision-making processes. She calls him “an exemplary honest broker” and says he was “fair to everybody on the staff,” making sure everyone, no matter their rank, had a chance to give equal input. “It was very clear the president really trusted the way that he handled his job.”

Cathie Martin first met Kavanaugh when they both were lawyers in Washington, D.C., running in the same professional and social circles; they later worked together in the White House. “We had children at the same time and spent those early parenting years together, at each other’s houses, dealing with children’s birthday parties, and holidays, and babies,” she says. “You get to know people pretty well during those times.”

Martin says Kavanaugh was always highly professional in the workplace: “He’s a really reserved and humble guy, so he had a way of connecting with staff throughout the White House in a very friendly and unassuming way.” At one point, Martin managed a staff made up of people under 30, who she says “were always highly impressed with how professional and respectful [Kavanaugh] was to them, not to mention to his peers and seniors.”

McBride agrees that Kavanaugh was always highly regarded for the way he treated everyone with whom he worked, including women. “Honestly, I’ve worked in this town for 35 years. . . . I’ve seen the best of colleagues and not the best of colleagues,” she says. “There are very, very few in all those years who I can say I’d truly go to the mat for. Brett is one of them, because of the way he treated people around him, whether superiors or subordinates. Even in the highly intense atmosphere of the White House, this is a guy who never lost his cool and had a sense of humor about him, even in the toughest of times, that was very helpful to be around. The way he treated everybody, men and women, was always the same.”

“Brett was the kind of person who, because he’s so mild-mannered, so accomplished, and has such a grounded center of what is right and good, he attracted really good people around him,” Martin adds. “He made you want to be better, and that’s why people who know him are standing up for him.”

All of these women are insistent that they are completely sure Kavanaugh would never commit the sexual misconduct of which he’s been accused — it would contradict everything they’ve experienced over decades of friendship with him.

“Knowing Brett, who honestly was always mature and respectful, nothing in his life has ever led us to believe he would do anything like this,” Mastal says

“I am 100 percent sure that this isn’t something he would do, because everything I know and have seen and experienced with Brett contradicts that,” Matan say. “If any of my friends had experienced anything differently, we would know about it. We could choose the guys we hung out with. No one was forcing us to hang out with that group of guys. We chose to hang out with those guys because we felt comfortable around them, they were fun to be with, and they respected us.”

McCaleb says she could never believe the allegations against Kavanaugh. “That just wasn’t Brett’s personality at all,” she says. “He was one of the more responsible ones of the bunch, there’s no question. He just was not aggressive in that way at all. When I heard the allegation, I was shocked. . . . I don’t doubt that something happened to [Ford] at some point. But not with Brett. Never ever.” 

“I’m confident that he’s incapable of doing this,” says Martin, “because I know Brett’s character and I know his heart, and I know what kind of person he is. He’s been nothing but ethical and moral and good and decent in all aspects, professionally and personally, in all the time I’ve known him.”

DeVol says she’s never been a political person and has never gotten in an argument over politics, but she feels an obligation to stand up for her friend’s character. She even wrote a letter this week to Senators Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins saying just that. “It’s devastating to watch Brett and his family go through this,” she tells me over the phone, her voice shaking. “He is just such a good person. I can’t imagine how he’s surviving this. He is a good, good person and he would never do what she says he did. It’s crazy what they’re doing to him. None of it is true.” 

How evil does someone have to be to set out to ruin someone like this?

 

This is how badly they want to see fetal Americans continue to get their brains vacuumed out of their skulls

These creatures stop at nothing:

A Democratic congressional intern was arrested Wednesday and accused of posting the personal information of at least one Republican senator during last week's hearing about sexual assault claims against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, authorities said.

U.S. Capitol Police said 27-year-old Jackson Cosko was charged with making public restricted personal information, witness tampering, threats in interstate communication, unauthorized access of a government computer, identity theft, second-degree burglary and unlawful entry. Police added that the investigation was continuing and more charges could be filed.

Senior congressional sources tell Fox News that Cosko most recently worked as an unpaid intern for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas. He previously worked with Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and former Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California. He also worked or interned with the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as with at least one other unnamed lawmaker. A LinkedIn page with Cosko's name on it describes him as a "Democratic Political Professional & Cybersecurity Graduate Student."

Jackson Lee's office told Fox News that Cosko had only worked there for a couple of months, but has now been terminated.

“It’s unfortunate,” Glenn Rushing, Jackson Lee's chief of staff, told Fox News. Rushing added that the congresswoman's office is "cooperating with law enforcement."

Just remember, all you Republicans tempted to go squishy, this is how the enemy wages war.

And, of course, Yale and Harvard being what they are in 2018 post-America, they have gone full jackboot:

For many years, Judge Kavanaugh has taught a course at Harvard Law School. A couple of days ago, that Cambridge-based plutocratic bastion of privilege, smugness, and political correctness announced that Judge Kavanaugh was no longer welcome to teach there. Later,  a coven of lonely and unappealing Harvard feminists filed a battery of groundless Title IX claims against him.

Hundreds of alumni, students, and faculty of Yale Law School have signed an open letter denouncing the school’s implicit support of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Among other things, the signatories of this malodorous missive say that Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination represents  “an emergency -- for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country. ... Without a doubt, Judge Kavanaugh is a threat to the most vulnerable. He is a threat to many of us, despite the privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are.”

These were once citadels of the best humankind has thought, the bulwarks of Western civilization against the barbarity into which humankind so easily sinks. Now they themselves sink to the bottom of the sewer that is post-American culture.

This is the problem with the Republicans having chosen the Very Stable Genius

You know about his little excursion into the definitely fishy aspects of Ford's testimony at his rally to his base in Mississippi last evening.

There is nothing to dispute in the fundamental argument underlying what he did. It's also true that this is yet another example of this ever-reliable axiom: Donald Trump will always choose the most boneheaded way to deal with anything.

And in this case, he could not have thusly let loose at a worse time. Now the Republican squishes - Collins, Murkowski, Flake - are so incensed about it they're sending out back-on-the-fence signals.

This would have been handled so differently by any number of 2016 Republican presidential candidates, any of whom would have beaten the supremely unappealing (except to feminists) Madame Bleachbit.

But the VSG, with no sense of strategy, is delivering us another nail-biter - over an imminently qualified jurist, excellent father and husband, exemplary girls' basketball coach and devout follower of Lord Jesus.

And one last thing that is tangentially related: Michael Avenatti would not be on our radar screens if the VSG had not had sex with his porn-star client in 2006, mere weeks after the VSG's third wife had given birth to his fifth kid.

Why is discourse in post-America so infantile and devoid of substance?

Looks like a big cause is basic ignorance:

Just a third of Americans can pass a multiple choice "U.S. Citizenship Test," fumbling over such simple questions as the cause of the Cold War or naming just one thing Benjamin Franklin is famous for. 

And of Americans 45 and younger, the passing rate is a tiny 19 percent, according to a survey done for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Worse: The actual test only requires that 60 percent of the answers be correct. In the survey, just 36 percent passed.

Among the embarrassing errors uncovered in the survey of questions taken from the U.S. Citizenship Test and conducted by Lincoln Park Stragtegies: 

• 72 percent of respondents either incorrectly identified or were unsure of which states were part of the 13 original states.

• 24 percent could correctly identify one thing Benjamin Franklin was famous for, with 37 percent believing he invented the lightbulb.

• 12 percent incorrectly thought WWII General Dwight Eisenhower led troops in the Civil War.

• 2 percent said the Cold War was caused by climate change.

It gets worse:

According to the foundation analysis: 

Only 13 percent of those surveyed knew when the U.S. Constitution was ratified, even on a multiple-choice exam similar to the citizenship exam, with most incorrectly thinking it occurred in 1776. More than half of respondents (60 percent) didn’t know which countries the United States fought in World War II. And despite the recent media spotlight on the U.S. Supreme Court, 57 percent of those surveyed did not know how many Justices actually serve on the nation’s highest court. 

Huge numbers of post-Americans have no idea what is really important, so it's easy for them to fall for shiny objects like "social justice" and "economic equality."

The NAFTA replacement deal: the excitement is because we didn't go full protectionist

James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute explains that it's just a mildly-tinkered-with update of what we already had:

If President Trump is correct, the new and supposedly improved North American Free Trade Agreement — inelegantly renamed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement by Trump — is a “historic transaction.” Like, what, the Louisiana Purchase or the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo or some such?

Maybe a lowering of expectations is called for here. To believe that the agreement is even just a good, solid deal for the American people requires accepting several things to be true that almost certainly aren’t — despite what the president has said in the past.

The Very Stable Genius's hyperbole doesn't stop with "historic," though. We were saved from the "worst deal":

First, the president has claimed that NAFTA Classic, signed in December 1993 by President Clinton, was the worst trade deal in American history. Of course, maybe by “worst” what Trump means is that all the U.S. trade deals have been pretty good and NAFTA was really just the least pretty good — kind of like how “Solo” is the worst “Star Wars” film but is actually totally fine, especially as a rental.

But obviously that is not what Trump means. His (perhaps sole) long-held, core economic belief is that decades of dumb trade deals such as NAFTA have impoverished America. Recall that, as a presidential candidate, Trump said America was once “a very powerful, very wealthy country. And we’re a poor country now.” (Actually, U.S. household net worth is over $100 trillion and middle-class median incomes, adjusted for inflation, are up 42 percent since 1979.)

NAFTA has been a gentle tailwind pushing the economy forward: A research review by the Congressional Budget Office found that NAFTA and other U.S. trade agreements overall boosted growth, worker productivity and wages. And a University of Chicago survey of top economists found that 96 percent agree or strongly agree that, on average, Americans have been “better off” with NAFTA than if the previous trade rules had remained in place.

It’s also just odd to think NAFTA could really have ruined the U.S. economy when the combined Canadian and Mexican economies are only an eighth the size of America’s.

And, although Trump claims NAFTA 2.0 “greatly opens markets to our farmers and manufacturers, [and] reduces trade barriers to the U.S.,” that was already the case with NAFTA 1.0: The whole point of the agreement was to make the entire region a free-trade zone. And it worked wonderfully, tripling trade flows between the three nations to more than $1 trillion.

The greater access to Canadian dairy markets and the 75 percent must-be-made-in-North-America vehicle content may be mild boosts, but nothing earth-shaking.

The exuberance exemplified by the soaring stock market is pretty much a sigh of relief, actually:

So why, then, did investors and business groups seem so happy with the new deal if it was only a minor tweaking of the old one? Simple: Cosmetic changes, even if they make the deal a bit worse in some places, are vastly preferable to the U.S. leaving NAFTA or hitting Canada with auto tariffs if it continued to reject the U.S. proposal. In other words, Trump is taking credit for eliminating the uncertainty that he created, much like a firefighter who douses the fire he started and then wants a medal from the mayor.

But it gives him something to tweet about.

 

 

The prosecutor who queried Ford: as flimsy a case as I've ever seen

Some plain speaking from from Rachel Mitchell:

After last Thursday’s testimony by Christine Blasey Ford, commentators rushed to call her a credible witness. Did the professional prosecutor with 25 years of experience in sexual assault cases agree? Not really, no, as Rachel Mitchell explained in a detailed analysis she provided after the hearing to the Senate GOP caucus, The Arizona prosecutor laid out her case in a memo published earlier today by the Washington Post.

SEE ALSO: Axios: White House has no Plan B if Kavanaugh is borked

The “bottom line,” Mitchell writes, is that this case doesn’t meet either a probable-cause nor a preponderance-of-evidence standard. Furthermore, the experienced sex-crimes prosecutor states, there are significant reasons to doubt Ford’s recollections:

In the legal context, here is my bottom line: A “he said, she said” case is incredibly difficult to prove. But this case is even weaker than that. Dr. Ford identified other witnesses to the event, and those witnesses either refuted her allegations or failed to corroborate them. For the reasons discussed below, I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the Committee. Nor do I believe that this evidence is sufficient to satisfy the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard.

Mitchell notes how the story has changed in the telling of it, even over the last couple of months, although she never states that Ford is being deliberately deceptive. One key point: in her original letter, Ford told Feinstein that she could hear Kavanaugh and Mark Judge talking with other party-goers while she hid in the bathroom, but testified in the hearing that she didn’t hear any talk at all. Ford had just “assumed” a conversation took place. Furthermore, the timing of the attack seems to have shifted since Ford’s initial text to the Post on July 6, when she described it as the “mid 1980s,” a time which matched the Post’s reporting of her therapist notes that said Ford had claimed it occurred in her “late teens.” Only after Ford got in contact with Feinstein did the timing of the attack get narrowed to the “summer of 1982.”

There are logical gaps in Ford’s story as well as suspicious details within it, Mitchell argues. For instance, Ford can recall that she was taking no medication the night of the alleged assault and that she had only one beer — but she can’t remember how she got to the party, and more importantly, how she left: 

Given that this all took place before cell phones, arranging a ride home would not have been easy. Indeed, she stated that she ran out of the house after coming downstairs and did not state that she made a phone call from the house before she did, or that she called anyone else thereafter.

Mitchell also raises questions about Ford’s memory in the near term. Ford couldn’t recall whether she’d been recorded during her polygraph, even though that was a significant event from less than two months earlier. Ford also couldn’t recall whether she shared her therapy notes with the Washington Post or summarized them. In fact, Ford seemed to insist that she had paraphrased them, even though the Post report clearly stated that Ford had provided at least a portion of them to the reporter.

Ford never shared her therapy notes with the committee, Mitchell points out, which makes it tougher to determine just how dispositive they might be. However, the Post’s account of those notes give different details than those Ford gave the committee. Ford claimed that the Post’s account of them was in error. Although Mitchell doesn’t make the argument explicit here, the prosecutor clearly implies that a refusal to share share supposedly dispositive evidence reduces Ford’s credibility. 

I guess we still have to wait for the FBI to weigh in, per what Senate Pubs, due to Jeff Flake's terminal case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, agreed to. But this pretty much tells us what we need to know.