monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Gabby Miller
‏@giphychiller
Fox & Friends: It's ok if Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Christine Ford as a juvenile because our justice system is about "rehabilitation" and for him to rise to this level of power "suggests he has been rehabilitated"

Adam Weinstein
‏Verified account
@AdamWeinstein
One runs the Miami campaign for Trump’s handpicked gubernatorial candidate. One owns two local food chains and sat next to Trump on a pro-tax cuts panel. One was a GOP congressional candidate. One runs the Women’s Republican club of Miami.

Dan Eggen
‏Verified account
@DanEggenWPost
Kavanaugh grew frustrated when it came to questions that dug into his private life, particularly his drinking habits and his sexual proclivities...He declined to answer some questions altogether, saying they were too personal"

Jamison Foser
‏@jamisonfoser
Brett Kavanaugh wrote a memo urging Ken Starr to ask Bill Clinton if he “ejaculated into the sink.”

hypocrisy abounds.

Kavanaugh grew frustrated when it came to questions that dug into his private life, particularly his drinking habits and his sexual proclivities...He declined to answer some questions altogether, saying they were too personal"

Brett Kavanaugh wrote a memo urging Ken Starr to ask Bill Clinton if he “ejaculated into the sink.”

To become a Supreme Court justice you must have been a senior judge for at least two years or a qualified lawyer for at least 15 years. When there is a vacancy, the justice secretary, also known as the Lord Chancellor, will set up a selection commission. It will consult senior judges who are not putting themselves forward for the court, along with the justice secretary and key figures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The justice secretary can accept or reject a nomination. The prime minister then makes a final recommendation to the Queen, who makes the appointment.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has criticised the US following a deadly attack on a military parade.

Gunmen opened fire at Revolutionary Guard troops in the south-western city of Ahvaz on Saturday, in an attack claimed by both an anti-government Arab group, and Islamic State militants.

Mr Rouhani said the "bully" US and the Gulf states it backed had enabled the attack.

The US has denied this and says it condemns "any terrorist attack".

Mr Rouhani will face Donald Trump at the UN General Assembly this week.

Saturday's attack killed 25 people, including 12 soldiers, civilians watching the parade, and a four-year-old girl.

Ahvaz National Resistance, an umbrella group that claims to defend the rights of the Arab minority in Iran's Khuzestan Province, said the group was behind the bloodshed, while IS also claimed the attack.

Neither group provided evidence to show it was involved.

For his part, Grassley spent the last few days setting and re-setting deadlines for Ford and her legal team. He originally set a Friday morning deadline for them to accept the Committee’s offer to have her testify, then extended it to Friday night, adding that he was scheduling a Committee vote on Kavanaugh for Monday that would go forward if Ford didn’t agree to his terms. That ultimatum didn’t work, and Ford’s lawyers sent Grassley and the Committee a scathing letter rejecting his timeframe late Friday. The senator then extended his deadline once again to 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, and fired off some Friday night tweets complaining about the process.

Less than fifteen minutes before the Saturday deadline, Ford’s lawyers sent a letter to the Committee informing them that she had accepted the offer to come testify, and would do so “next week,” but that they hoped to enter into further negotiations to work out the details. The White House, via unnamed senior official comments, rejected the letter as a stalling tactic, but negotiations between the Ford team and the Committee seem to have proceeded fruitfully anyway.

The letter from Ford’s lawyers put Grassley in the difficult position of having to either delay the process even further, or reject the Ford team’s overture as too little, too late, and plow ahead with the Committee vote on Monday. Not accommodating Ford, however, would lead to Grassley and many other GOP lawmakers spending the run-up to the midterms articulating a rationale for dismissing Ford’s willingness to testify without signaling that they didn’t want to hear from her in the first place.

In addition, there wasn’t a guarantee the White House and Senate Republicans would have been able to obtain the votes they needed confirm Kavanaugh without hearing from Ford first. They probably had them before the emergence of Ford and her allegations, but not after a wild week of almost wall-to-wall national news coverage featuring some outrageous attempts by Kavanaugh’s allies to discredit or sow doubt about Ford and her story. The allegation and high profile aftermath also meant that Republicans could not depend on the support of any of the Senate’s more conservative Democrats.

According to “one official close to the discussions” who spoke with the Times, however, there has been ongoing concern within the GOP about how Republican voters would respond to an attempt to push through Kavanaugh in spite of Ford’s allegation. On the other hand, there is also some anxiety over how voters and donors will respond if the GOP fails to confirm Kavanaugh and secure the ideological majority on the Supreme Court that the party has been chasing for decades.

Kavanaugh, meanwhile, has been preparing all week at the White House for his own testimony before the committee. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the 53-year-old judge has, according to White House sources, practiced condemning sexual assault and avoiding the questioning of Ford’s credibility, though he “grew frustrated when it came to [mock] questions that dug into his private life, particularly his drinking habits and his sexual proclivities.”

Miss Michigan
✔
@MissAmericaMI
Because I had never seen a survivor come forward and be treated with dignity, so why would I believe my case would be different? #WhyIDidntReport

4:54 PM - Sep 21, 2018

“We will release Ford’s yearbooks,” said Mike “Thomas Paine” Moore of True Pundit. “We have some already in-house and are working on obtaining more and these are all unedited, raw just like when they were published in the 1980s.”

Moore noted every electronic trace of the yearbooks have been scrubbed from the internet in recent weeks.

Until now.

“There is some crazy stuff in these yearbooks,” Moore said. “No wonder they vanished. But we at True Pundit feel it is important to release the unedited versions prior to Judge Kavanaugh’s hearing this week where Ford is also scheduled to testify.”

From Cruz’s point of view, the clip is damning of his opponent. It is not clear precisely which part of O’Rourke’s argument he disagrees with — that it’s wrong for police to murder an innocent person in their home? That it was wrong for them to release the claim that the murder victim had some pot in his house? That O’Rourke opposes the killings of unarmed black men in general?

Cruz has not taken issue with any of these specific points on the campaign trail. Instead he has tended to dissolve the issue into a broader question of respect for the police, which he displays with his characteristic smarm. Nowhere in this clip does O’Rourke attack the police in general, dispute the need for effective policing, or insist that all or most officers are racist.

The element that Cruz considers damning is O’Rourke campaigning against police injustice (even a very clear one) before a heavily black audience. Cruz understands that his victory requires overwhelming support and turnout from whites, and he believes that if his opponent is seen as representing African-Americans and their dismay with the system, it will cause a white backlash from which he will benefit.

This is not Trump-style overt racism. It is old-fashioned conservative wink-and-nod Willie Horton racism, leading the audience toward the desired conclusion without shouting it out for them like Trump does.

7) Even in conservative states, the old cutting-taxes-and-spending agenda is losing steam.

One of the more remarkable trends of the primary season, which accompanied and in some states affected primaries in both parties, was renewed public interest in teacher pay, educational investments, and expanded health care services.

A wave of strikes and protests around education issues hit West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona and Colorado. Veteran government-bashing pols like Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker are in serious trouble. Initiatives to force Republican legislatures to expand Medicaid are on the ballot in Idaho, Montana, Nebraska and Utah.

8) A lot could still happen to affect midterm results.

Despite a pretty clear pro-Democratic trend that is typical of the losses the White House party usually suffers in midterms (especially when the president’s job approval ratings are as low as Trump’s), there are a lot of close races.

The authoritative Cook Political Report rates 30 House races, eight Senate races, and nine gubernatorial races as toss-ups.

Despite signs of Democratic enthusiasm, there are still grounds for doubting that young and Latino voters will shake their habits of skipping midterms.

Economic trends, developments in the Mueller investigation, Supreme Court confirmations, and even a possible government shutdown could all create the kind of small but significant mini-trends that tip close races.

The primaries were by-and-large encouraging to Democrats. But Republican turnout has been up as well, and November 6 could be a battle of polarized voter “bases” that are roughly equal in intensity. We don’t know yet how well each party has mobilized for early voting, in an environment where Republicans have fought to restrict opportunities for voting before Election Day.


The six remaining weeks could be wild.