Alex Kozinski resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct. His son clerked for Donald Trump’s supreme court pick
Last year, before he became a supreme court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh hired the son of a close friend to serve as his clerk, even though the clerk had not earned a spot on the Yale Law Journal, as almost all Kavanaugh’s previous Yale clerks had.
Related: 'No accident' Brett Kavanaugh's female law clerks 'looked like models', Yale professor told students
Continue reading...This visible solidarity of women must count for more than validating shared experience
The hearing is over. Christine Blasey Ford has shared her truth and gone. The Republican Senators have ignored her testimony and Brett Kavanaugh is closer to claiming a lifelong seat on America’s supreme court.
I am sixteen-and-a-half thousand kilometres away from the rooms in which these events have transpired, yet late at night and in moments of quietude, I am in all of them – rendered something supernatural and out of space and time by a rage that’s as hot and thick as lava. And I’m not alone.
Continue reading...This visible solidarity of women must count for more than validating shared experience
The hearing is over. Christine Blasey Ford has shared her truth and gone. The Republican Senators have ignored her testimony and Brett Kavanaugh is closer to claiming a lifelong seat on America’s supreme court.
I am sixteen-and-a-half thousand kilometres away from the rooms in which these events have transpired, yet late at night and in moments of quietude, I am in all of them – rendered something supernatural and out of space and time by a rage that’s as hot and thick as lava. And I’m not alone.
We are, each one, the testimonies that are detailed, excruciating and unashamed
Related: ‘She was paid by the Democrats’: Trump fans on Ford and Kavanaugh
We owe it to Christine Blasey Ford to infiltrate the most powerful of the professions and change them
Related: Brett Kavanaugh and why we should not buy into a ‘trust women’ narrative | Letters
Continue reading...
In internet showdown justice department lawsuit is designed to quash a California law that restores protections
The US justice department has sued the state of California, just hours after the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, signed legislation to restore internet protections known as net neutrality.
The justice department said it would take California to court on grounds that the federal government has the exclusive power to regulate net neutrality.
Continue reading...In The Washington Post, Prof. Shamus Khan notes that Brett Kavanaugh's elite past and current social circles explains his willingness to mislead and lie: "Elite schools like Georgetown Prep and Yale have long cultivated this sensibility in conscious and unconscious ways."
Schools often quite openly affirm the idea that, because you are better, you are not governed by the same dynamics as everyone else. They celebrate their astonishingly low acceptance rates and broadcast lists of notable alumni who have earned their places within the nation’s highest institutions, such as the Supreme Court. I heard these messages constantly when I attended St. Paul’s, one of the most exclusive New England boarding schools, where boys and girls broke rules with impunity, knowing that the school would protect them from the police and that their families would help ensure only the most trivial of consequences. [...]While they seem contradictory, servant leadership and privilege are often bedfellows. Both suggest not a commonality with the ordinary American, but instead a standing above Everyman. Both justify locating power within a small elite because this elite is better equipped to lead. (Retired justice Anthony Kennedy, according to some reports, hand-picked Kavanaugh as his successor — a rather astonishing circumvention of the democratic process and the separation of powers.) Both have at their core not a commitment to shared democracy but a moral imperative to lead because of one’s exceptional qualities. And both allow space for lying in service of the greater good. Privilege means that things like perjury aren’t wrong under one’s own private law.
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES • THE WEEK’S HIGH IMPACT STORIES
xDems: Please stop moaning re SCOTUS *BECOMING* politicized. It's ALWAYS been politicized. Kavanaugh lies just pull off the mask. Time to fight & win the political war, on behalf of popular sovereignty & transparent judiciary: https://t.co/iG1khSxRiu
— Paul Rosenberg (@PaulHRosenberg) September 30, 2018On this date at Daily Kos in 2012—Welcome to the culture war against teachers, coming to a theater near you:
The campaign against teachers is special, and worth paying attention to. It's not like workers in general get much respect in our culture, at least not beyond vague lip service that only ever applies to the individual, powerless worker not asking for anything. And janitors, hotel housekeepers, cashiers, and a host of others could fill books with the daily substance of working in low-status professions, I'm sure. But right now, teachers are the subject of a campaign heavily funded and driven from the top down to take a profession that has long been respected by the public at large and make the people in the profession villains and pariahs, en route to undercutting the prestige, the decision-making ability, the working conditions, and, of course, the wages and benefits of the profession as a whole. What we're watching right now is a specific front in the war on workers, and one with immense reach through our culture—and coming soon to a movie theater near you if it's not already there, in the form of the poorly reviewed parent trigger drama Won't Back Down.
(That it's a war not just on teachers but on the workers of the future and on the government just sweetens the pot for many of the people waging the war.)
| Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio.” |
It seems like a lifetime ago that I was in the service. Looking back, I can say I joined for myriad reasons: to escape an alcoholic household; to pay for college; out of a sense of duty and service I felt I owed to this country; and finally, the influence of my uncles and my dad, all members of the Greatest Generation who had served in World War II.
I was not by any means a stellar soldier. My hair was often too long, and I complained a lot about the Mickey Mouse rules we had to follow. But I did my duty, and saw and did things in those four years that most people would never be able to do. I served two tours at Observation Post Alpha on the East German-West German border while a member of the 54th Engineer Battalion supporting the 1/11 Armored Cav; I earned my Air Assault qualification; I served in the 101st Airborne Division. I was a combat engineer: I could build bridges, and do the algebra required for explosives calculations in my head. I was an NCO (non-commissioned officer), and as a team leader for an engineer squad, I was responsible for over a million dollars’ worth of equipment, and the lives of six men, at 21 years of age.
When I got out of the Army and headed to college, I had no idea that my biggest challenges would be ahead. I will never forget the first party I went to in college. I already felt out of place, as I was four years older than everyone else, and felt a thousand years more mature. This party may have taken place in late 1989 or early 1990, but its memory still burns. Early in the evening I was talking to a young woman, and we were hitting it off—and then I mentioned I had just gotten out of the Army. The conversation drastically changed. She said, “So did you go into the Army because you were not smart enough to get into college?”
I am not often at a loss for words, but that night I was. I was proud of my service. But this woman had just questioned my intelligence because I had served. During this same period I was finding I had little in common with my friends, and they would not want to talk about my experiences in the military. It became, “Oh, an Army story, can we talk about something else?” I was supposed to care about their lives, and what they had done and accomplished—but nothing I had done, seen, or experienced was considered worthy of discussion.
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley issued a blistering response to a letter from Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders demanding an investigation not just into the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh regarding sexual misconduct, but also into whether or not the judge lied about his high school and college drinking habits.
Sanders shared a copy of his letter on Twitter early Saturday morning.
Lying to Congress is a federal crime.
The FBI must examine the veracity of Kavanaugh’s statements under oath in addition to the sexual assault allegations against him. Kavanaugh’s truthfulness with the Senate goes to the very heart of whether he should be confirmed to the court. pic.twitter.com/TsNOTm4fxK
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 29, 2018
The letter outlined a number of concerns — from the allegations made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnik to claims that Kavanaugh wasn’t exactly truthful when he testified that he had never been drunk enough to black out or forget what had happened during a period of time.
Grassley responded in a letter that also made the rounds on Twitter.
This is amazing @ChuckGrassley smack down of @SenSanders pic.twitter.com/uyzDjirptq
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) September 30, 2018
Grassley accused Sanders of being disingenuous in his request, pointing out that in spite of the hours of testimony and hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation available, Sanders had publicly announced his decision to oppose Kavanaugh’s confirmation less than 24 hours after he was nominated.
His letter read, in part:
Your public statements clearly reveal how unimportant it is to you to review any facts related to this nomination. So you can imagine my surprise at receiving your letter regarding the supplemental FBI background investigation. This supplemental FBI background investigation was requested by undecided members of both parties. Am I to take from your letter that you are now undecided and willing to seriously engage with the Senate’s advice-and-consent constitutional duties related to the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to serve as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States? If so, we should have a conversation about what information you need to assist you in making a decision, and I look forward to that conversation.
Sanders has not yet responded to Grassley’s letter.
Via DailyCaller
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has made a mockery out of the Supreme Court nomination process. Now, she has found herself in hot water following the controversy surrounding Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and it has everything to do with her alleged treatment of Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.
Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton appeared Sunday on CBS’ “Face The Nation” and took Feinstein to task for how she used Ford.
“The Democrats have disgraced this process and the United States Senate in the orchestrated smear campaign of character assassination they’ve run against Judge Kavanaugh,” Cotton said.
“She has been victimized by the Democrats in this process,” he added. “They betrayed her own requests for confidentiality. They leaked this to the media at the last minute because they are on a search-and-destroy mission for Brett Kavanaugh.”
For his part, Cotton empathized with Ford, saying she was “sympathetic” and “sincere” in her testimony.
What he did criticize, however, was the disgusting way in which Democratic leadership weaponized an alleged victim of sexual assault.
“(Democratic leaders) have betrayed her,” Cotton said.
Cotton’s most pointed revelation, however, was the looming investigation into how Feinstein handled Ford’s request of confidentiality.
“Dianne Feinstein and her staff is going to face an investigation for why they leaked (Ford’s confidential letter alleging Kavanaugh assaulted her),” Cotton said. “She came forward confidentially to Dianne Feinstein. Dianne Feinstein did not share that with the proper authorities.”
If these allegations of misappropriate handling of confidential information are true, it makes Feinstein look a thousand times worse than she already does.
What a despicable and inhumane use of a person’s potential trauma for political gain. It’s no different than someone profiting off a dog-fighting ring.
Perhaps the best part of all of this is that Feinstein may have brought this on herself. If you stuck around for the very end of the first major Kavanaugh hearing, that sound you heard was Ford’s body being run over by a bus.
After being grilled about how the confidential letter leaked, Feinstein had the unmitigated gall to blame Ford.
“It’s my understanding that her story was leaked before the letter became public, and she testified that she had spoken to her friends about it and it’s most likely that that’s how the story leaked, and she had been asked by press,” Feinstein said.
She could have easily dismissed the notion and said that neither she nor her staff had anything to do with the leak. But then she turned around and blamed the victim? Absolutely reprehensible.
I honestly can’t think of a better stupid prize for Feinstein and her cronies than a thorough investigation into the stupid game of how a confidential letter was leaked to the public.
Via WesternJournal
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September 30, 2018
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