There is one simple reason why Donald Trump had to have Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court: as insurance should he be imperiled by an investigation by federal authorities, namely the Mueller FBI special investigation. After the midterms, Trump plans to fire Sessions as Attorney General and hire someone who will not recuse himself and who is loyal to him. Then he will try to shut down the special investigation; he may need the Supreme Court at any time after that. Fortunately for us, investigations by state Attorneys General are moving into action now. Matters such as Trump’s evasion of hundreds of millions of dollars in estate taxes, gift taxes, income taxes, and so on, by fraudulent means will be seen by state Attorneys General as a priority when the federal government refuses to lift a finger against Trump.
A Democratic-majority House may delay actual impeachment for Donald Trump in order to perform nearly-endless investigations that the public will find deeply entertaining. That should improve the climate for the general elections of 2020.
When this matter goes to the Supreme Court, and it will, possibly more than once, Trump will be counting on certain justices to sway the case in his favor, and Kavanaugh will be right in there pitching for him. Nonetheless, a public climate inflamed by the spectacle of highly fruitful House investigations of Republican and specifically Trumpian wrongdoing will help elect Democratic candidates in 2020. Because 2018 will not be enough to tilt the Senate to the Democratic side and elect a Democratic President.
Unless House investigations of Kavanaugh also bear incontrovertible proof that the Senate cannot ignore, it may be 2024 or later before any changes in the Supreme Court can be hoped for. Thus, we are in for a long era of “neoliberal” capitalism with another potential market crash like that of 2008 looming in 2020 or thereabouts.
Even after the Supreme Court has been changed to reflect better the liberal attitudes of the majority of Americans, there will still be the issue of federalism that the Court has turned severely to the right over the last fifty years. Meaning that the Supreme Court has embraced the novel idea that the federal government doesn’t have the power to do anything as active as they have been doing, such as regulate carbon dioxide levels, promote universal health insurance, guarantee the rights of LGBT people or of women in general, or even regulate air pollution in general. Or even the right to prohibit slavery. Yes, it’s sick.
The ideas behind this notion of federal government impotence are too complex and annoying to get into here; suffice it to say that there is a twisted logic behind the attitude that a federation of states doesn’t have sufficient authority to impose its will on all the multifarious peoples in its sovereign states. Try that type of thinking on China, and see if you can stand up to them; I don’t think it will fly because the Chinese believe that they’re all one country and one government, and that makes them stronger than us.
From now on, this site will be updated very irregularly due to alienation.
(cartoon courtesy of pixabay.com)
NBC news has reported online tonight, via the Microsoft News app, that the White House is ordering limitations on whom the FBI can question and what questions they can ask. In short, the FBI is completely prohibited from investigating the allegations of Julie Swetnick, who claimed that she saw Brett Kavanaugh in line at a gang-rape that was going on in the bedroom of a friend’s house… and also claimed that she herself was raped with the aid of a drug, although Kavanaugh was not among her rapists. In addition, the FBI is not to make comparisons of the drinking history that Kavanaugh claims and the much heavier drinking that his room-mates and others allege.
These restrictions are a pure partisan attempt to hobble the FBI’s investigations of allegations of sexual misconduct by Brett Kavanaugh. Although the FBI will be able to question Mark Judge, who claims to remember no such incident, they will not be able to make wider inquiries of individuals not on the short list, nor of new individuals whose names come up in the course of their work. There is a significant likelihood that the FBI will miss bad conduct that is not alleged by the two main accusers and heavy drinking that the nominee has been trying to hide despite direct questions from Democratic Senators. Kavanaugh met the questions about his drinking with angry cross-questions, such as, “How much do you drink, Senator?” that never answered the direct query at hand, viz: just how much beer have you had to drink at various times in your life?
Under these circumstances, the Democratic Party’s position cannot waver: Kavanaugh has lied on multiple occasions during his nomination hearings and does not deserve to be a Supreme Court judge because of his lack of candor, lack of temperamental restraint, and partisanship. The accusations of sexual misconduct are serious but need not be proven in rejecting his nomination because he even without the accusations, he does not meet the high standards expected of a Supreme Court Justice.
There is abundant evidence that Judge Brett Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker in high school and college. He even admitted to drinking “a few beers” but denied ever blacking out. Given the number of lies and misleading statements he made during his regular confirmation hearings, we are bound to be skeptical of his veracity in this matter, when it could disqualify him from the Supreme Court. He made misleading statements about his activities while working as a lawyer and legal justifier for the policies of the second Bush administration, where torture was legally justified, and indefinite detention at Guantanamo was touted.
If it were not for the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene, inmates at Guantanamo would not even have the right to bring habeas corpus appeals. In fact, that decision was hotly contested by the then-minority conservatives, and the appellate court has seen fit to ignore it recently, resulting in more time in legal and carceral limbo. One prisoner has been there for sixteen years, almost since the prison was first opened, yet there is no evidence that he participated in any terrorist acts directly.
Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court would mean a conservative majority despite the timely death of its leading light, Antonin Scalia. Justice Scalia was a dependable conservative who could be relied upon to twist the facts in evidence or even adduce additional notional “facts” to justify his illiberable rulings. If the previous president, Barack Obama, had been allowed to nominate a judge to the court as regular procedure dictated in the eleven months remaining in his term, it is possible that we would not be having this discussion.
Justice Gorsuch is not as extreme as Scalia was, but he is equally dependable as a conservative. Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions are likely to be equally one-sided. He has all the conservative qualifications needed except one: his character as an adolescent and as a legal adult in college has been whitewashed. Those who shepherded his nomination knew that he had a history of heavy drinking, but they glossed over it.
It is entirely possible that he believed that he was telling the truth when he claimed, in an interview on Monday, to have been a virgin in high school and college (he is a devout Catholic, like most of the rest of the Supreme Court.) His history of frequent alcohol overuse at that time makes his memories of events that occurred while he was intoxicated highly suspect. The second and third of the women to come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct are also vulnerable to memory lapses because they admit that they were drinking when they were assaulted. However, the memory of something terrible that happened to you when you were drunk, even thirty or forty years ago, is surely burned deeply into your brain. A routine “flashing” or a casual sexual assault could easily be forgotten by the one who committed that crime while drunk.
So it is entirely possible that both Kavanaugh and his accusers sincerely believe they are right. If so, why does not Kavanaugh demand a polygraph test or a thorough investigation? Is he merely caught up in the president’s rush to confirmation, or is he afraid of what might come out in an FBI probe? He may well be aware that investigators will quickly come up with strong evidence that his peer group engaged in parties in which they would get a girl drunk and then serially rape her on several occasions, both in high school and in college. Their notion of “consent” most likely extended to cover a female who was too drunk to resist, so there was nothing to feel guilty about. Even if he has no memory of participating in such rape parties personally, he is fully aware that his friends were doing it on a regular basis, and the stench of that revelation would end his bid for the high court.
By all the evidence that has come out in the past week, primarily as a result of reporting by the New Yorker, Brett Kavanaugh belonged to societies, a fraternity, and even a secret club when he was at Yale as an undergraduate. The fraternity in particular was notorious for heavy drinking. A close friend of Kavanaugh, Mark Judge, wrote in a book that he and his friends got blind drunk almost every weekend when they were in high school as juniors and seniors. More importantly, he has no recall of events that occurred when he was that drunk. This makes his denials of sexual assault tenuous at best.
Absent a public statement that he is a recovering alcoholic, it is hard to reconcile Mr. Kavanaugh’s other public statements. To be blind, staggering drunk repeatedly throughout one’s senior year in high school and freshman year in college implies that he had to somehow recover from this behavior in order to become a functioning adult individual. In fact, he became a conservative lawyer and worked for such far-right law firms as the one that investigated President Clinton and elicited all the gory details, recommending impeachment. President Bush has publicly detailed his heavy drinking as a youth and his religious conversion after a drink-driving car accident. Why has not Kavanaugh made a similar statement– or have I just missed it?
Now it can be said plainly in words of two syllables or less: Donald J. Trump is a cancer on our country. Projection is a classic example of the irrational things that a delusional, narcissistic sociopath would do: claim that his adversaries are guilty of the very crimes he has committed. He has enriched himself at the expense of everyone he has met and that is a cancerous, sociopathic personality. In a word of two syllables: a cancer.
His claims about the revelations to be found in documents he has ordered declassified can be dismissed out of hand. Even if documentary evidence of a conspiracy against him within the FBI is found, it can be excused purely on the basis of self-defense against a malignant entity: radical conservatives as represented most clearly by Donald J. Trump himself.
It is a little-known fact that Anita Hill actually had more than a dozen (15) women lined up behind her ready to testify, but the Democratic Senate leader wouldn’t let them be heard because he didn’t want Ms. Hill’s testimony to completely derail the nomination of Clarence Thomas– he had already made a deal with the President to let Thomas’ nomination squeak by with the barest minimum of votes. Further, it is a little-known fact that Justice Thomas had a verified history of heavy use of pornographic films from a local establishment… don’t ask me how I know these things because I just know.
At the current writing, the accuser is unwilling to testify until the FBI has completed an investigation. The Republicans, however, intend to hold a hearing next Monday come hell or high water because Donald J. Trump has claimed that the FBI “doesn’t want to” investigate. So we will find out the mood of the country in the next couple of days and we’ll see if there is a hearing with an empty chair next Monday. I don’t think the Republicans could be that tone-deaf, but I’ve been surprised before.
Actually, according to this blog (which looks authoritative), posted by Richard M. Langworth in 2011, Churchill didn’t say that; there are no references available, or no attribution for that statement was found. Neither is the statement pictured authentic (according to Mr. Langworth), although it is frequently attributed to Churchill as well as Lincoln. Churchill did, however, say, “…do not be carried away by success into demanding more than is right or prudent.” (He was speaking before the House of Commons in March of 1919, shortly after the Allies had won the First World War.) Which is not nearly as inspiring although it may be much more practical.
I heartily recommend, despite the error of attribution (the quote titling this post) that occurs at the end, the movie “Darkest Hour”, a dramatization of Churchill’s election as prime minister and the British strategic miracle of Dunkirk– the rescue of nearly 300,000 men from the beaches at Dunkirk was only made possible by the sacrifice of a much-better equipped pocket of 4,000 soldiers at the nearby port of Calais, who provoked the wrath of Hitler’s panzer tank army. The movie covers Churchill’s speeches to the Commons, including his famous, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds… we shall fight in the fields; we shall fight on the streets… we shall never surrender.” Much of the latter part of the movie concerns Churchill’s decision not to negotiate with Hitler (although a channel was opened through Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain decided to go along with Churchill and Lord Halifax, the other powerful pacifist, was exiled to Washington after Churchill’s defiant speech.)
This speech is re-enacted at the end of the movie; the quote attributed to him (mistakenly: “Success is not final; failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts”) appears at the very end after a few sentences describing the evacuation of Dunkirk after May 28 1940, and, five years later on May 8 1945, the victory over Germany. Then the text states, “a few months later he was defeated for re-election.” So that quote fits in that place well in the movie, although it is disappointing to find out a few minutes later through Google that the statement is apocryphal. The statement actually fits his life quite well too, since he was in the War Cabinet in the First World War and spent the entire peacetime interval between wars as a back-bencher, a lonely bellicose voice.
I am beginning to think that the main category of economic’s and the difference between major macro economic plans isn’t between Keynes, Hayek, Robinson, and others. Rather what drives one’s theoretical choice is really a question of how we sublimate , in Nietzsche’s terms , the natural human need to punish. Liberals generally rationalise taking from those who have surplus and redistribute it . And they use things like data and evidence and concepts like the public good to justify this. They also note how many, many rich are born on third base thinking they hit a triple and work to accumulate more , often producing great amounts of negative externalities for the wider society. Conservative/ libertarians want to punish the weak, the sick, women , and other traditionally oppressed groups, because hey, the winners proved there worth by hitting triples. I invite readers to look closely at the smug satisfaction of the hard core right wing Republican Party when they throw people off of medicaid, or make food stamp recipients take drug tests, while blowing up the deficit so they can write off their private jets. It’s not enough that they line their pockets with gold snatched from the public purse, they need to villainize and crush the poor, single mothers, hungry kids as somehow deserving their lot. Look at the faces in the rose garden reception after the house voted to kill Obamacare. Tell me beyond all the social science and numbers that Nietzsche isn’t onto something.
(Why they insist on punishing people who are poor through no fault of their own is a mystery, but if Nietzsche said we have a need to punish people for being weak, that’s good enough for me. )
Quoted from the Cult Education Institute’s Web Site:
By Rick Ross, Expert Consultant and Intervention Specialist
Ten warning signs of a potentially unsafe group/leader.
- Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
- No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
- No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement.
- Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.
- There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
- Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances.
- There are records, books, news articles, or television programs that document the abuses of the group/leader.
- Followers feel they can never be “good enough”.
- The group/leader is always right.
- The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.
Ten warning signs regarding people involved in/with a potentially unsafe group/leader.
- Extreme obsessiveness regarding the group/leader resulting in the exclusion of almost every practical consideration.
- Individual identity, the group, the leader and/or God as distinct and separate categories of existence become increasingly blurred. Instead, in the follower’s mind these identities become substantially and increasingly fused–as that person’s involvement with the group/leader continues and deepens.
- Whenever the group/leader is criticized or questioned it is characterized as “persecution”.
- Uncharacteristically stilted and seemingly programmed conversation and mannerisms, cloning of the group/leader in personal behavior.
- Dependency upon the group/leader for problem solving, solutions, and definitions without meaningful reflective thought. A seeming inability to think independently or analyze situations without group/leader involvement.
- Hyperactivity centered on the group/leader agenda, which seems to supercede any personal goals or individual interests.
- A dramatic loss of spontaneity and sense of humor.
- Increasing isolation from family and old friends unless they demonstrate an interest in the group/leader.
- Anything the group/leader does can be justified no matter how harsh or harmful.
- Former followers are at best-considered negative or worse evil and under bad influences. They can not be trusted and personal contact is avoided.
(image courtesy of pixabay.com)
Some scientists predict that wildfires will increase in size to three times the current burned area by 2100 due to climate change… drought and beetle infestations have reduced good trees to dried-up husks ready for a spark– to grow into a fire-storm that creates its own weather, with 300-foot tall flames and pyrocumulus clouds. This morning a free-running fire crossed interstate highway 5 in northern California and forced drivers to flee on foot as trapped vehicles burst into flames
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and skeeze)
Conrad Theodore Seitz 