Stall, Stall, Stall

After a week or more of demanding an FBI investigation into the accusations against Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the Democrats finally have one. naturally they are not satisfied. Why? Because they are to turn in the results in a week. Fired FBI Director James Comey wrote an editorial in the New York Times complaining that it needs to be an open-ended investigation.

Contrast this with what was being said just a few days ago. Democrats were insisting that the FBI conduct an investigation prior to Dr. Ford testifying. Back then they insisted that such an investigation would only take a couple of days. Here's an example from CBS News:

Townsend said the FBI probe into the claims would take "a couple of days."

"This is not weeks or months," she said.

Townsend pointed to Anita Hill's testimony in 1991 for the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, where Hill alleged Thomas had engage in sexual misconduct.

Why would an investigation take a couple of days before the hearing but need more than three times that long now?

Because it's not about finding the truth, it's about stalling. They tossed out the "couple of days" figure to try to delay reopening the hearing. If the Republicans had gone along with that then the Democrats have insisted on stretching out the investigation. The goal was to delay the hearing as long as possible.

Now that they got the hearing and the investigation they are trying to delay the confirmation vote. The investigation is just a tool to delay the vote.

That's how the confirmation process has been going all along. Senators who announced that they were opposed to Kavanaugh insisted that they needed every possible document from his time in the Bush administration. This was a combination of stalling tactic and hope that something disqualifying would miraculously appear.

Once the FBI finishes its investigation then something else will come up and the Democrats will demand more delays. The short-term goal is to push the confirmation past the election. Then, the Democrats will argue that a lame-duck Senate shouldn't be able to hold a confirmation vote. Their real hope is to take the Senate then refuse to confirm any Trump nominees.

As a long-term strategy, this is terrible. It invites retribution and court-packing since nominees will only be confirmed when the White House and Senate are controlled by the same party.

The Democrats need to realize that's where this is going and ask themselves if that's the future they really want.

Then kick themselves for answered yes and answer the question again.

The Poisonous Lie about Rape Culture

One of the accusations hurled at Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is that he was part of a gang rape where a girl would be drugged then the boys lined up to rape her. Judge Kavanaugh described this as being something out of he Twilight Zone - something that never happened in his life.

This accusation should be preposterous. The idea that gang rapes go on regularly is absurd, or it should be. There is absolutely no evidence that such things happen. But feminists insist that colleges are part of a "rape culture" where such things do happen and are covered up.

Rolling Stone got itself in trouble a few years ago after running a story claiming that freshmen had to rape someone as part of a fraternity initiation. The author of the piece originally wanted to write about the rape culture in ivy league schools but was unable to find any cases. She settled for Virginia Tech, which was still prestigious enough for her purposes. But she and her editors failed to check the story. It was too good to be true and turned out to be false.

Other similar stories about gang rapes on campus have also turned out to be lies.

The truth is that such crimes are very rare and very repulsive. When they do happen, rather than turning a blind eye and covering it up, most men want justice for the victim.

Even rape itself has always been taboo. Yes, it happens and has always happened. So does murder. And for centuries the penalty for both was death.

In the last few decades feminists have redefined rape from a repulsive crime to a tool for perpetuating the patriarchy. I order to do this, they've had to redefine the meaning of rape. Women can withdraw their consent after the fact, sometimes days or weeks after the action.

And they conflate unwanted attention with physical actions in order to inflate the statistics.

All of this is meant to browbeat men in general or any man who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Brett Kavanaugh is that man right now. Feminists fear that his elevation to the Supreme Court will mean a reversal of Roe v. Wade. So they are pulling out the rape card and accusing Judge Kavanaugh of sex crimes. And we are supposed to believe these accusations regardless of the lack of evidence. Simply by being a white man from a well-off family, Kananaugh is automatically part of the group they've been slandering as rapists so his guilt is predetermined.

The Kavanaugh Accusations

Currently the nation has erupted into a debate over the guilt or innocence of Judge Kavanaugh. The judge has been accused of groping a 15-year-old when he was 17 and having exposed himself to a fellow student when he was in college. Despite there being no witnesses, the left has already decided that this makes Kavanaugh unfit for the Supreme Court. (Note - one woman claimed that "everyone in the school knew about the first accusation" but later admitted that she had no idea if the incident she was remembering involved Kavanaugh or his accuser.)

While I'm sure that people across the country are in an actual fury over the accusations, I also think that it is a manufactured fury modeled on the confirmation hearing for Justice Clarence Thomas. Kavanaugh had already passed the judiciary committee and was on his way to confirmation. The worst anyone could pin on him was  doctored response that implied that he didn't understand the difference between birth control and abortion. Then Senator Feinstein let it out that she'd been sitting on an anonymous letter accusing Kavanaugh of some sort of sexual assault decades ago.

Let's be honest, the reaction of the left was "Hot damn, we've got him now!"

They've already shown that they don't really care about assaults against women by politicians. They said so about Bill Clinton. Look at the collective yawn about the allegations against Keith Ellison. These are much more credible - there are police and medical reports and they happened recently. But no one cares. There are also allegations about Cory Booker who, ironically, is one of the senators interrogating Judge Kavanaugh.

If they really thought these claims were credible then Senator Feinstein would have released them well before the hearings. Instead she held the letter as a last-ditch effort to stop Kavanaugh.

The point of all of this is not to determine if Judge Kavanaugh is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. It is to keep the court from having a conservative majority. If Kavanaugh's name is withdrawn then something will be found to disqualify his successor. The idea is to stall the confirmations in the hope of a Democrat majority in the Senate. If the Democrats do get a majority then we can expect that they will refuse to confirm any candidates that President Trump names. This will be ironic after all of the complaints over the Republicans refusing to confirm President Obama's lame duck appointment. But they'll do it because this has always been about power.

Decades ago the Democrats decided that it was easier to go around the legislatures and the messy business of amending the Constitution and take their case to the courts. Roe V. Wade is the most prominent of these cases but there have been a slew of them. And the #Resistance has mainly been fought out in the courts with judges preempting executive orders. Eventually these will filter their way to the Supreme Court and the Democrats want to be sure that the cases are ruled in their favor, or result in a tie which will allow the lower-court rulings to stand.

Because the courts have become so important to the left, confirmations have gone from fairly routine to a circus. They are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their alternative to democracy. If it means elevating a story (with no evidence) of an unwanted groping into an attempted rape, they are only too glad to do this. After all, it's only a conservative's life they are ruining. He should be ashamed to even exist (which is what a protestor recently yelled at Senator Cruze while driving him out of a restaurant).

The Kavanaugh Accusations

What to make of the accusations that Brett Kavanaugh sexually attacked a 15-year-old when we was 17?

There are two obvious possibilities - that it happened just as his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, describer or that she's outright lying. But these events happened nearly 40 years ago. There are several ways that Ford could be telling the truth as she sees it but not accurately describing what happened.

Here's the thing - memory isn't fixed. It's malleable and can play trick on you. What's more, Ford claims that she didn't tell anyone about the incident for decades. Memory is not a video file that can be reversed and replayed at will. It's a bunch of incidents with links to and from them. If you don't think about an event for a long time then it can be difficult to accurately reconstruct it. It's also possible to create false memories. One notorious example came from the 20th century's most notorious witch trial (and I'm not speaking figuratively). Members of a preschool were arrested on charges that they took their charges into underground chambers where they performed satanic ceremonies. This was impossible since the preschool was build on a slab with no basements. It turned out that people questioning the children had planted false memories in the kids by asking specific questions. Keeping that in mind, here are ways that Ford's memory could have played tricks on her:

It didn't happen as described. Was Ford actually forced into the bedroom or did she embroider the story to excuse being alone with two drunken guys (while possibly drunk herself)? She cold have been telling herself that it wasn't her fault that she was alone with them until she believed it.

It wasn't Kavenaugh. Did Ford know the two people who were in the bedroom with her? Or did she later decide it was these two? And if it was later, how much later was it?

It happened to someone else. Ford has very distinct memories of the incident but everything surrounding it is vague. Possibly she heard someone else describe the event and internalized it until she believes that it happened to her then fixed on Kavanaugh and his friend Judge as the perpetrators. This is the very definition of a false memory.

Because of the way this allegation was made, there was no time for a proper investigation. What we do know is that there is no supporting evidence. None at all. Of the three names we have, two deny that anything happened. In cases like this, investigators look for a pattern of behavior. Men who abuse women don't limit themselves to a single victim. Look at Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lower. Or Bill Clinton or Donald Trump. They all left a long trail or women willing to come forward and accuse them. So far, Ford stands alone in accusing Kavanaugh. But, at the same time, multiple women have supported him. His wife and two previous girl friends plus 200 other women have all vouched for his character.

Given how unsupported the accusations are, they should never have been made public. It's likely that they were only released to blacken Kavanaugh's name and force delays in the confirmation vote. The ultimate goal to to put off any confirmation vote until after a new, Democrat-controlled Senate is confirmed. After that, no one that President Trump nominates will be confirmed. Period.

What's more, we can expect similar accusations for all future Republican nominees to the Supreme Court.

A dirty trick like this should not be allowed to succeed.

A deplorable anniversary

September 11th is the sad anniversary of the 9/11/01 terrorist attack that killed thousands and led to a pair of seemingly-endless wars.

But, on the bright side, it's also the second anniversary of one of the worst weekends of the Clinton campaign. First, on September 9th, her description of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables" became public. It wasn't the first time she'd used it. She'd been using it as an applause line in private events. But this time she said it in public and it was widely reported.

Either she got so comfortable using the line or she assumed that the press would continue to cover for her. Or she simply forgot where she was. Her health wasn't the best that weekend.

Things got worse when she collapsed at a 9/11 tribute and was seen being dragged to a car like a sack of flower in a jumpsuit. She left her campaign to twist in the wind, first saying that she's overheated (on a not-particularly hot day) then that she was dehydrated (is it really the best move to say that your candidate won't drink water, suggesting that she only imbibes alcoholic beverages?) before settling on pneumonia a the cause. She topped this of with an accusation of sexism - she tried to "power through" the pneumonia because women aren't allowed to get sick.

Clinton continued to lead in the polls but this one-two combination motivated Trump voters to vote against her while reinforcing her reputation as a liar.

With All Due Respect Mr. Obama

Recently former President Obama gave a speech that broke with tradition and criticized President Trump while glorifying his own administration. Here's a few thoughts I have about what he said:

Obama: "How hard is it to say Nazis are bad?"

At least as hard as it is to say "Killing cops is bad." During your presidency, My Obama, two cops were shot and killed from ambush in New Orleans. At the same time BLM protests were calling for "More dead cops". Did you call for the protestors to moderate their rhetoric? No. Did you meet with the families of the slain police or send a representative to their funeral to signify that you were against killing police? No. But you did meet with BLM leaders just days after the shooting.

Obama: " When you hear about this economic miracle that's been going on… when the job numbers come out … suddenly Republicans are saying, 'It's a miracle,'" he said. "I have to kind of remind them, actually those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015 and 2016."

Not really. Here's the official numbers. During 2015 unemployment started at 5.7 and dropped to 5.0. During 2016 unemployment had a high of 5.0 and a low of 4.7. It was 4.8 in January, the month that you left office. It dropped to 4.7 in February, 2017, Trump's first full month in office, 4.6 the month after that and has not been above 4.4 since August of 2017. The unemployment rate has been below 4.0 four of the last five months. It is currently near the lowest in 18 years. Unemployment among minorities is the lowest ever.

Granted the economy bottomed out from the crash of 2008 and recovered under Obama and the current trend is a continuation of the Obama recovery. But it is untrue to claim that years when unemployment fluctuate between 4.8 and 5.7 are the same as years in which it is 3.8-4.7.

What the Kavanaugh Hearings Are Really About

The opening days of the Senate hearings for Judge Kavanaugh have been full of theatrics, both from spectators and Senators. We've had women dressed as Handmaids, a guy wearing a full-body condom, Senators who announced weeks ago that they will vote against Kavanaugh insisting that they don't have enough time to evaluate all of the paperwork. There have been accusations that a Mexican Jew was flashing a white power sign and that Kavanaugh refused to shake the hand of the parent of a Parkland victim and instead called security.

All of this is an attempt to Bork the judge. The term goes back to the nomination of Judge Robert Bork for the Supreme Court. That was a successful attempt at derailing a nomination by painting a judge as being outside norms. In both cases it was insisted that ratification would mean the end of legal abortion and a return to the days of back-ally abortions.

The claim that the two nominees would be a threat to abortion is, at best, dubious. Bork represented the winning side in Roe vs Wade. The theory was that he secretly hated winning his more important case and, through the sheer weight of his intellect, would convince the rest of the court to vote against abortion. The assumption that Kavanaugh will vote to overturn abortion isn't quite as dubious but there's no weight to it, either. There's no reason to think that a single justice will suddenly make the court reverse Roe Vs Wade and it's just speculation that Kavanaugh would support such a reversal.

Clearly abortion is just being used to motivate people. It's not a real issue.

But Roe vs Wade figures into this. It, along with the decision allowing same-sex marriage, are two important examples of how the left has used the courts to bypass Congress. That's what this is really about - trying to preserve a court that swings liberal.

Most of the #Resistance to President Trump has centered on court challenges. These are, at best, a holding action unless they can count on a liberal, activist Supreme Court. They will also become less effective and Trump appoints more judges.

When Harry Reid triggered the Nuclear Option a few years ago, it was with the expectation of a permanent Democratic majority. The hope was to pack the courts. And the expectation of President Clinton appointing two or more liberal justices.

So things blew up in the Democrats' faces. Instead of assuring a liberal court, they are watching a president they hate shift the courts to the right.

They have very few options. One is to try to stall Kavanough's nomination or derail it in the hope that a blue wave will give them the Senate next year. Then they can either try to keep the court at 8 members for the remainder of Trump's (first) term or hope that Trump gives up on Kavanough and nominates a blank-slate justice who turns out to be more liberal than expected. The chances of any of this coming to pass are poor. Current projections show the Republicans will keep the Senate and it's way too early to assume that Trump will not be reelected.

The biggest problem for the Democrats is that they are playing the short-game. Triggering the Nuclear Option gave them a short-game advantage but it's now working against them.

Previously, a well-qualified judge could count on an easy confirmation. Republicans have continued that tradition but after the current theatrics, I expect Republicans to start retaliating in kind the next time a Democrat is in the White House. That's a long-game reaction to the Democrats' short-game strategy. In fact, just days after Senator McCain's funeral and the call for decorum, we have hearings full of theatrics. One short-game strategy trounced all over a different one.