Poll: Kavanaugh confirmation. Place your bets, ladies and gents!

more likely to come from Mike Judge's mouth

Then Kavanaugh is so ashamed that he withdraws himself from the nomination process and demands that Merrick Garland be appointed in his place, and then the republicans are so ashamed that they all agree to do it

and then Piggy from Voivod comes back to life

hey this alternate reality sounds pretty groovy

and THEN everyone’s like “wait a second, we make enough food to feed everyone in the world, there’s no reason for anyone to go hungry. it’s a distribution issue - and we can fix it.

we could poll alternate universes to see which one most ilxors would prefer to live in

This exact universe but I have a nice peppermill

that's this universe if you just go to the store and buy a nice peppermill

we have enough nice peppermills to give to everyone; it's just a distribution issue

Peppermills for all. It's a campaign platform that is nothing to sneeze at.

Make America Spicy Again

late on this, but going back and reading some of the documents that came out from Kavanaugh's high school years, it's weird how much he was simultaneously a prick and a priss, which I guess is sort of a uniquely prep school combo, an uptight rich dudebro with excessive planning and time management skills for his age and a deep underlying anxiety.

Even his overly inside-joke-riddle yearbook is so fucking tryhard.

why did you revive this thread? My shoulders started tensing again.

(it's okay -- revive away!)

Oh, it's a very specific type that I'm unfortunately very familiar with. they're also known as "yes ma'am" guys

Eddie Harasskell

ugh what a read: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/inside-georgetown-prep-culture-of-omerta-scandal?mbid=social_twitter&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter&utm_brand=vf&utm_medium=social

Yeah.

big story in NYTimes about Deborah Ramirez

among other things

Ms. Ramirez’s story would seem far less damaging to Mr. Kavanaugh’s reputation than those of Dr. Ford, who claimed that he pinned her to a bed, groped her and tried to remove her clothes while covering her mouth.

But while we found Dr. Ford’s allegations credible during a 10-month investigation, Ms. Ramirez’s story could be more fully corroborated. During his Senate testimony, Mr. Kavanaugh said that if the incident Ms. Ramirez described had occurred, it would have been “the talk of campus.” Our reporting suggests that it was.

At least seven people, including Ms. Ramirez’s mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time.

We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)

and

Ms. Ramirez’s legal team gave the F.B.I. a list of at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence. But the bureau — in its supplemental background investigation — interviewed none of them, though we learned many of these potential witnesses tried in vain to reach the F.B.I. on their own.

Two F.B.I. agents interviewed Ms. Ramirez, telling her that they found her “credible.” But the Republican-controlled Senate had imposed strict limits on the investigation. “‘We have to wait to get authorization to do anything else,’” Bill Pittard, one of Ms. Ramirez’s lawyers, recalled the agents saying. “It was almost a little apologetic.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and member of the Judiciary Committee, later said, “I would view the Ramirez allegations as not having been even remotely investigated.” Other Democrats agreed.

Ultimately, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, concluded, “There is no corroboration of the allegations made by Dr. Ford or Ms. Ramirez.” Mr. Kavanaugh was confirmed on Oct. 6, 2018, by a vote of 50-48, the closest vote for a Supreme Court justice in more than 130 years

wow susan collins must be concerned

hard to see how any of that's going to matter at this point, but maybe I'm overly jaded

susan collins blows (and i still have to figure out what to do with susancollins2020.com, which i registered that week), but she only stands out because she publicly waffled on it for a day or so. almost all of the other 49 were gung ho for the golden boy from day one

xp none of that is going to matter at this point

just fucking AMAZING to think about the FBI not interviewing ANY of the 25 supplemental witnesses she provided, though. granted, iirc, time was very short since grassley allowed a few more days for an investigation to take place (due to protesters forcing jeff flake to play a version of a person with a conscience in an elevator). i don't remember when Ramirez's story entered the equation, and of course i don't know when the list of 25 was provided to the FBI and how short their window was. but holy shit, if nothing else at least just CALL one of the 25 fucking people during the short window provided, even if that window was only 2 hours or whatever. what an abdication of duty as a civil servant, you stupid fucking bastards.

Do the people who love Clarence Thomas still, decades later, claim to believe Anita Hill was a crazy liar, or do they now take the tack of "Oh well sure he did those things but why do feminists have to overreact to a man being a man sometimes?" I mean I think now that Kavanaugh is safely confirmed for life there will be a lot of folks who seamlessly switch from "it's sick that someone would invent such terrible tales to bring a good man down" to "who among us has not presented their dong to an unwilling party guest"

at least some of the republicans had already progressed to that stage of the Kübler-Ross-esque bullshit model for how to support a sexual assaulter for supreme court, even during the nomination process. i think that's the stage right after "we believe christine blasey ford. we just don't believe that the golden boy did it."

*remembrance bubble* oh wait, THAT'S why susan collins is reprehensible, even among a crew of 50 immensely powerful people who knowingly voted for a sexual assaulter

Make a serious candidate page featuring her actual platform. It'll be hilarious enough on its own

Xposts

I don't think a Republican senate would have rejected Kavanaugh if the Ramirez incident had been captured on video and played for them.

It's not going to matter regardless of who furrows their brow, because the only course of removal is impeachment, which has been tried for a SCOTUS justice precisely once (1905) and he was acquitted by the Senate.

And obv the FBI won't get in any trouble

lindsey graham is very very upset at you for bumping this thread and might just blow up some iranian oil to show you what's what

50 immensely powerful people who knowingly voted for a sexual assaulter

And serial perjurer.

I mean a Ron Paul voter once told me, after being presented with evidence that he was probably racist and actually agreeing with said evidence, replied "Well it's too bad a slightly racist Representative is the only man who can fix our country's problems. I still gotta vote for him".

So no doubt they'd be cursing the Democrats for "forcing them to elevate a rapist to the court to save America"

Man! Y'all should post a trigger warning for reviving this thread.

At this point every Republican is a walking trigger warning for me.

Ugh more like walking triggers!! I saw this thread and paranoidally (?) figured that someone somewhere in the news cycle figured Oh! it has been a while since we talked about sexual assault and what better way to bring it up again than a new accusation against that piece of garbage BK!!

from august 7, but our nation turns its lonely eyes to Buzzfeed

#FOIA thread screed

FBI, the WORST agency when it comes to transparency, the agency that routinely violates #FOIA, has ONLY NOW, after NEARLY A YEAR OF LITIGATION, decided to tell me & @BuzzFeedNews that it is withholding the report on its "investigation" into Brett Kavanaugh
1/ pic.twitter.com/nSxHdCYZOM

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) August 7, 2019

more of this please

I sat through those hearings. Brett Kavanaugh lied to the U.S. Senate and most importantly to the American people. He was put on the Court through a sham process and his place on the Court is an insult to the pursuit of truth and justice.

He must be impeached.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 15, 2019

A long read.

A devastating read.

I wish we could have learned what Brett Kavanaugh has actually done, said, worked on, enabled, covered for, empowered. Perhaps the next book will reveal more. Perhaps the one after that. The collective public conclusion of the most recent book, by Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin, seems to be that he was a sloppy, reckless, drunk youth who has largely become better, and that it is perhaps unfair to hold men to standards that we somehow always forgive when they are still boys. We didn’t get to have that conversation either. And the people who most deserve to decide whether he is, in fact, cured of these alleged acts of youthful carelessness, violence, and predation—the women who say he has harmed them—have, other than Ford, neither been heard nor recognized. I’m not certain they subscribe to the narrative that he was a naughty boy now recovered. He spent his confirmation hearing erasing them, and his boosters and fans have made their lives since unbearable. At any rate, they are also powerless, now, to change what has occurred.

It is not my job to decide if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty. It’s impossible for me to do so with incomplete information, and with no process for testing competing facts. But it’s certainly not my job to exonerate him because it’s good for his career, or for mine, or for the future of an independent judiciary. Picking up an oar to help America get over its sins without allowing for truth, apology, or reconciliation has not generally been good for the pursuit of justice. Our attempts to get over CIA torture policies or the Iraq war or anything else don’t bring us closer to truth and reconciliation. They just make it feel better—until they do not. And we have all spent far too much of the past three years trying to tell ourselves that everything is OK when it most certainly is not normal, not OK, and not worth getting over.

Another telling paragraph:

Two of the three women justices spoke out this summer to support their new colleague. They hailed him as a mentor to his female clerks or as a collegial member of the Nine and urged us, in the case of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, to look to the future and turn the page. It is, of course, their actual job to get over it. They will spend the coming years doing whatever they can to pick off a vote of his, here and there, and the only way that can happen is through generosity and solicitude and the endless public performance of getting over it. I understand this.

still amazed how the whole confirmation seemed to turn on Lindsay Graham throwing a literal tantrum on the floor of the Senate.

it was a powerful, persuasive moment for the dumbest people in the country

It was a stirring performance, I hope he added it to his reel.

it was the bathos of a sobbing Irish asshole 'being persecuted.' I thought it was pathetic but it turned on that, not Graham (although his remarks - I think he was the first to speak after BK's opening statement - made it clear the air had changed). of course it resonated with a lot of Americans.

The confirmation hearing was the first time I'd ever tuned in to a livestream of US Senate and wow I didn't realise I had that much respect to lose.

idk if this has been shared but it's an interview with mike davis, the strategist responsible for the intense doubling down on kavanaugh's innocence after it became clear he might lose the appointment. it is CHILLING and if you don't know about the "dead chicken strategy" i recommend reading the transcript or listening to the interview.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/podcasts/the-daily/impeachment-inquiry-democrats-republicans-kavanaugh.html?showTranscript=1

you learn all you need to know about him in the opening lines where he says he grew up the son of liberal democrats and won the Alex P Keaton award in 6th gr.
summary: his entire belief system/chilling worldview is a reactionary FU to his parents ;_;

Graham's tantrum was one of the most disgusting moments in US political history, I remember getting this sinking feeling in my stomach because I knew it was gonna work. it sucked because after Ford gave her testimony I thought he was sunk. I was like...there's no way anyone's gonna call this woman a liar, her credibility is clear as day. and of course the endgame was just to get her out of the room, send the prosecutor home (!!!) and spend hours thumping the table & apologizing profusely to Kavanaugh