Month: September 2018

I could maybe see Amy Klobuchar catching fire with Democrats during the 2020 primaries. It’s not impossible. The nation is not doing much to indicate it deserves her, however.

Everett Edward Kavanaugh Jr. was born in New Haven, Connecticut on June 9, 1941. It’s not too hard to figure out why he was born in New Haven. His father, Everett Edward Kavanaugh Sr., was not only born there but he also attended the city’s most famous institute of higher learning– Yale University.

Now, Brett Michael Kavanaugh, was not born in New Haven, Connecticut. He was born in Washington DC on February 12, 1965. It’s not too hard to figure out why Brett wasn’t born in New Haven, Connecticut like his daddy and granddaddy. That’s because his father Everett Jr. did not go to Yale. He went to Georgetown University. And then he got a job locally as a sales representative for the Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company where he worked for five years beginning in 1963.

Naturally, since Brett was not born in New Haven, Connecticut and his father did not actually attend that city’s most famous institute of higher learning, that means that Brett did not have any connection to Yale University.

Of course that’s nonsense, so when he testified under oath on Thursday that “I got into Yale Law School. That’s the number one law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college,” he must have been making the rather pedantic point that while he was a legacy student as an applicant to the Yale undergraduate program, he was actually accepted to the Law School strictly on merit.

The thing is, Kavanaugh probably got accepted as a Yale undergrad without needing his granddaddy as a notch. It’s just that he likes to talk about his merit as a student at the strangest times:

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (Yale University, Class of ’78): So the vomiting that you reference in the Ralph Club reference, related to the consumption of alcohol?

BRETT KAVANAUGH (Yale University, Class of ’87): Senator, I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school. Captain of the varsity basketball team. Got in Yale College. When I got into Yale College, got into Yale Law School. Worked my tail off.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: And did the world “ralph” you used in your yearbook…

Several things were kind of great about this exchange, like the fact that Sen. Whitehouse’s grandfather, Edwin Sheldon Whitehouse, was a Class of ’05 graduate of Yale University which made Kavanaugh’s Class of ’28 grandfather a bit of a newb. And yet there Brett was demonstrating, one legacy to another, just how hard it is to explain away membership in the high school Ralph Club.

The problem, obviously, is that Sheldon is basically just a Protestant version of Brett. He knows it’s possible to crush your courses at an Ivy League school when you really only used to get juiced in it. He knows this because he witnessed it firsthand.  And he also knows the look of a guy who did so many keg stands at Yale that his face is permanently blood-flushed.

BRETT KAVANAUGH (Yale University, Class of ’87): I like beer. I like beer. I don’t know if you do…

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (Yale University, Class of ’78): OK.

BRETT KAVANAUGH: … do you like beer, Senator, or not?

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: Um, next…

BRETT KAVANAUGH: What do you like to drink?

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: Next one is…

BRETT KAVANAUGH: Senator, what do you like to drink?

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: … Judge, have you — I don’t know if it’s “boufed” or “boofed” — how do you pronounce that?

BRETT KAVANAUGH: That refers to flatulence. We were 16.

Watching these Elis pretend not to know the meaning of boof and ralph made for some excellent theater for people like me who spent half my senior year at Princeton High School at parties with Princeton University seniors. It reminded me of the time I witnessed Brooke Shields (Princeton University, Class of ’87) hurl into a heavyweight Hefty trash bag on the front lawn of the Colonial Club after losing one too many points in Beer Pong.

Has anyone called her up to get the correct pronunciation of boof?

I have a few observations on Jeff Flake’s interview with McKay Coppins:

McKay Coppins: As of Friday morning, you were planning to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. By the afternoon, you were calling for an FBI investigation before you could support his confirmation. What happened in those few hours that changed your mind?

Jeff Flake: I don’t know if there was any one thing, but I was just unsettled. You know, when I got back to the committee, I saw the food fight again between the parties—the Democrats saying they’re going to walk out, the Republican blaming everything on the Democrats.

And then there was [Democratic Senator] Chris Coons making an impassioned plea for a one-week extension to have an FBI investigation. And you know, if it was anybody else I wouldn’t have taken it as seriously. But I know Chris. We’ve traveled together a lot. We’ve sat down with Robert Mugabe. We’ve been chased by elephants, literally, in Mozambique. We trust each other. And I thought, if we could actually get something like what he was asking for—an investigation limited in time, limited in scope—we could maybe bring a little unity.

We can’t just have the committee acting like this. The majority and minority parties and their staffs just don’t work well together. There’s no trust. In the investigation, they can’t issue subpoenas like they should. It’s just falling apart.

The most important piece of information in that response is that Sen. Jeff Flake changed his mind because of what an opposing senator said. But it’s important to note that Flake readily admits that he wouldn’t have listened to the same words if spoken by a different Democratic senator. He was willing to listen to Chris Coons because he’s established a relationship with him. The lesson is that being an effective senator is not simply a matter of coming up with the right argument or giving the best speech. To be truly effective, you need to earn and maintain some trust. What makes the partisans’ hearts swell is different from what delivers results for those partisans, and Chris Coons is a vastly unappreciated senator who should serve as a role model to newcomers.

The rest of Flake’s response is fairly obvious stuff to any casual observer of Congress. The two parties do not get along or function in a minimally collegial way. I blame conservatives for this, but things like the Coon-Flake collaboration are rare and getting rarer all the time.

Coppins: So, you were motivated mainly by preserving institutional credibility?

Flake: Two institutions, really. One, the Supreme Court is the lone institution where most Americans still have some faith. And then the U.S. Senate as an institution—we’re coming apart at the seams. There’s no currency, no market for reaching across the aisle. It just makes it so difficult.

Just these last couple of days—the hearing itself, the aftermath of the hearing, watching pundits talk about it on cable TV, seeing the protesters outside, encountering them in the hall. I told Chris, “Our country’s coming apart on this—and it can’t.” And he felt the same.

It’s a shame that Flake is leaving the Senate. It’s true that his replacement will potentially have a vastly better voting record or even provide for a Democratic majority in the Senate, but Flake seems to be alone or nearly so among Republicans in recognizing the need to take steps to tamp down the divides that are growing in our country. He gets the problem both for Congress and for the Supreme Court, but he won’t be there much longer to use his positive influence.

Coppins: Heading into Friday, what factors were you weighing as you decided how to vote?

Flake: It was a sleepless night. I was getting calls and emails for days from friends and acquaintances saying, “Here’s my story, here’s why I was emboldened to come out.” Dr. Ford’s testimony struck a chord, it really did, with a lot of women.

Coppins: What was it like hearing from some of those women?

Flake: I didn’t expect it. I mean, we’re getting women writing into the office. People we don’t know. Other offices, I’m told, are having the same experience.

In the post-Pie Fight era of this blog, I got my own education from users and diarists about just how alarmingly prevalent sexual abuse of women is in our society. It changed how I viewed the world, and it’s nice to see other men go through a similar process–especially powerful men with votes in the Senate. Hopefully, this will have an positive impact on more than a small handful of politicians, from both parties.

Coppins: The footage of sexual assault survivors confronting you in the elevator Friday has been widely viewed. What was going through your mind when they were talking to you?

Flake: Obviously, it’s an uncomfortable situation. But it was—you know, you feel for them. It was poignant.

I mean, keep in mind, their agenda may be different than mine. I think some of their concern was how Kavanaugh would rule on the court. They may have been there prior to the allegations against him because of his position on some issues. But it certainly struck a chord.

This is where we can still see the impact of tribal loyalty on Flake. He has a hard time listening to people who have a different ideology unless they’ve both been chased by elephants in Mozambique or have some other kind of bonding experience. A lot of people are this way, especially on the right side of the political spectrum, which is why I don’t write in ideological terms very often. It’s simply not persuasive political rhetoric. When I’m brutally critical of Republicans, it’s almost always on moral terms rather than ideological ones, and, truthfully, I’m more apt to consider moral critiques from Republicans than ideological arguments, too.

Coppins: As of now, are you planning to vote to confirm Kavanaugh unless the FBI finds something in the next week that changes your mind?

Flake: Yes. I’m a conservative. He’s a conservative. I plan to support him unless they turn up something—and they might.

This is the bottom line. Even for Flake, ideology is the ultimate barrier to correct moral thinking. I wrote a piece last week making the case against Kavanaugh on completely non-ideological terms and someone on Twitter noted that I’d failed to criticize him for some of his rulings as a judge. That’s intentional. His rulings as a judge are the best argument for him from the point of view of every single Republican in the Senate.

Flake should have seen enough from Kavanaugh in the hearings and record to not want him on the Supreme Court based solely on his truthfulness and temperament. He doesn’t need ironclad proof that he attempted to rape someone and that kind of proof isn’t possible anyway without an unexpected confession. Flake knows that Kavanaugh is toxic and that he’d remain so on the Supreme Court, so he should turn around his standard and say that absent compelling evidence that Dr. Ford has been lying or that her story cannot be true, he can’t support someone so under legitimate suspicion being on the Court with a lifetime appointment.

But he says, “he’s a conservative; I’m a conservative,” as if that alone is enough to justify his confirmation. Flake is falling short here precisely because he’s got ideological blinders on that put desired judicial outcomes ahead of other, higher and more important considerations.

Coppins: What do you want to to know from the FBI? Are there any specific questions lingering in your mind, or witnesses you’re eager to hear from?

Flake: Well, obviously, Mark Judge. That’s the one that sticks out because he was mentioned so much by Dr. Ford, and he might be able to shed some light on her recollection of time and events.

Yes, obviously Mark Judge is the most important witness who needs to be interviewed. He was supposedly in the room during the attempted rape of Dr. Ford. But this is a really inadequate response. What he wants to know is if her story stands up or whether it falls apart under scrutiny. Could a middle-aged woman living in California by pure chance and memory place the same people at a party that are listed on Kavanaugh’s calendar, correctly remember where one of them worked in the weeks afterwards, know that the accused weren’t traveling in Europe that summer or add in all the other details without any of it being disconfirmed?

If Dr. Ford could not have reasonably concocted such a story without making glaring errors, then it’s much more likely that she’s telling the truth. The FBI won’t find hidden camera footage or unseen witnesses, so absent confessions all they can do is try to disprove that the event could have happened under anything approximating the circumstances she described.

She was credible as a witness. So long as that doesn’t change, Kavanaugh should definitely not be confirmed.

Coppins: Your colleague, Ted Cruz, predicted that Mark Judge will just plead the fifth if he’s asked about the allegations—would that change the calculus for you?

Flake: You know, all we can do is ask. We’ve got to try.

This is barely responsive to the question. If Judge refuses to testify on the basis of potential self-incrimination, that ought to influence Flake one way or the other. You can’t give Kavanaugh a pass because his buddy hid behind the Fifth Amendment.

Coppins: You talked earlier about the crisis of authority facing American institutions. Do you worry that confirming Kavanaugh with these allegations hanging over him will do some damage to the long-term credibility of the Supreme Court?

Flake: Obviously. I’ve felt that this delay is as much to help him as us. My hope is that some Democrats will say “Hey, we may not change our vote, but this process was worthy of the institution, and we feel satisfied.” That means something. The country needs to hear that.

This sounds dangerously like Flake is intent on confirming Kavanaugh absent some kind of new evidence emerging from the investigation, but, again, the nature of this investigation is that the FBI can much more easily discredit Dr. Ford than find more compelling evidence than Dr. Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh. She was credible, so if her story stands up the Democrats are not going to think the process justifies confirmation. The country needed a better process and Flake thankfully provided for that, but he won’t have helped the divides in the country if he confirms Kavanaugh anyway when it’s clear that the FBI could not bring significant additional doubt onto Dr. Ford’s allegations.

Senator Flake should be commended for what he’s done and what he’s trying to do, but he’s still too bound up in the partisan warfare to be truly effective at leading us out.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting.  I will be painting an eastern shore Virginia house in a loose gothic style (early 20th century). The photo that I’m using is seen directly below. I like the various wires and telephone pole shadow and will be painting these. I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas.

I started with a pencil grid on both a print of the photo and the canvas.  In this way I was able to transfer the elements to the canvas in an accurate pencil sketch.  Next week some actual paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Last March, I predicted that “both ‘Jane’ and ‘Abacus’ will be eligible for News and Documentary Emmy Awards this fall, where they will be favored in their categories.”  I was right about “Jane,” which earned seven nominations two awards at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards.  Now it’s time to observe that I was right about “Abacus” earning a nomination for Outstanding Business and Economic Documentary at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards.  Joining it are three other Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature or Best Documentary Short Subject, “Edith and Eddie,” “Heroin(e),’ and “Last Men in Aleppo,” all of which I have written about before.  Along with “Icarus” and “Strong Island,” that means that four of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature and two of the five nominees for Best Documentary Short Subject have also been nominated for an Emmy.  Both the films and their fellow nominees should be impressed.

I begin my review of the nominees with what I wrote about “Abacus” late last year.

“Abacus: Small Enough to Jail,” has won four awards from the shows and programs I am using, including Best Political Documentary from the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards.  The Guardian review explains why it belongs here.

Veteran documentary-maker Steve James (Hoop Dreams) is back with an engrossing story: the extraordinary fiasco of the Abacus bank prosecution. It is a tale of hypocrisy, judicial bullying and racism. Abacus was a small neighbourhood bank serving New York’s Chinese community, which discovered a crooked employee falsifying mortgage documents, duly reported the matter to the authorities, but then found itself prosecuted by a district attorney who had sniffed a post-2008 PR opportunity to collar some real live bankers.

“Model minority” or not, Asian-Americans experience systemic racism, too.

Watch Abacus: Small Enough to Jail – Trailer for a preview.

From acclaimed director Steve James (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters, Life Itself), Academy Award® Nominee Abacus: Small Enough to Jail tells the incredible saga of the Chinese immigrant Sung family, owners of Abacus Federal Savings of Chinatown, New York. Accused of mortgage fraud by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., Abacus becomes the only U.S. bank to face criminal charges in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The indictment and subsequent trial forces the Sung family to defend themselves – and their bank’s legacy in the Chinatown community – over the course of a five-year legal battle.

Competing against “Abacus” for Outstanding Business and Economic Documentary are “Farewell Ferris Wheel” and “Vegas Baby” from “America Reframed” on World, “The Bad Kids” from “Independent Lens” on PBS and “Saving Capitalism” on Netflix.  Of all of them, I think “Saving Capitalism” is the strongest competition for “Abacus,” as it won Best Political Documentary at the Coffee Party Entertainment Awards for movies.  Looks like my fellow directors and volunteers at Coffee Party USA were on to something when they voted for Robert Reich’s film, giving it its first nomination and award.

Follow over the jump for the rest of the double nominees.
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The two Oscar nominees for Documentary Short Subject, “Edith and Eddie” and “Heroin(e),” are competing against each other at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards for Outstanding Short Documentary.  Joining them are “Mosul” from “Frontline” on PBS, “Long Shot” on Netflix, and “The New York Times Op-Docs: I Have a Message for You.”  I’ll be a good environmentalist and recycle what I wrote about both “Edith and Eddie” and “Heroin(e)” from Politics and diversity among Oscar nominated short subjects.

Moving down the list from Indiewire, which is arranged by the critic’s grade, is “Heroin(e),” a film about the opioid crisis in West Virginia.  The critic at Indiewire found it to be the most imaginatively named of the nominees and appreciated its focus on women who are trying to help the addicts, a judge, a fire chief, and a volunteer at a religious charity.
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Finally, “Edith+Eddie” examines the life and love of the oldest interracial couple in America.  Despite the billing, it is more the broken elder care system and about how adult children use legal guardianships to control the assests of their elderly parents than about race.  It was also the lowest rated of the nominated short documentaries by the critic at Indiewire.

Here are their trailers, beginning with Edith+Eddie.

2018 Academy Award® nominee – Best Documentary Short. Edith and Eddie, ages 96 and 95, are America’s oldest interracial newlyweds. Their love story is disrupted by a family feud that threatens to tear the couple apart.

Now, Heroin(e) | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix.

In the face of the opioid epidemic in a West Virginia town, three women are giving their community a fighting chance.

This is not the only nominee about the opioid crisis.  “Heroin’s Children” from Al Jazeera International USA is competing in three categories, Outstanding Science, Medical and Environmental Report, Best Story in a Newsmagazine, and Outstanding Editing: News, while “Investigating the Opioid Epidemic: The Whistleblower and Too Big to Prosecute” from “60 Minutes and the Washington Post” on CBS is competing against it for Best Story in a Newsmagazine.  I’ll do my best to look at both before the awards on October 1st.

The last Oscar nominee to earn an nomination at the News and Documentary Emmy nomination is “Last Men in Aleppo,” which is competing for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary.  Once again, I’ll be a good environmentalist and recycle an excerpt from Variety.

Unsurprisingly awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Fayyad’s film should have no trouble parlaying its Park City heat into extensive further festival play and acclaim, as well as offers from top documentary-specific distributors. Multi-platform release strategies are likely, aiming to engage audiences wary of venturing to theaters for such a heart-sinking chronicle. That said, the cinema is where “Last Men in Aleppo” firmly belongs. Together with co-director and editor Steen Johannessen, Fayyad brings a rigorous sense of craft and shock-and-awe scale to the film’s impressions of destruction, without impeding its anxious, on-the-hoof spontaneity. Any viewers coming to this after seeing “The White Helmets,” Netflix’s commendable, Oscar-nominated short on the SCD, needn’t fear seeing the same film again at greater length: This is a less cleanly packaged project, patient and nuanced in developing its individual human subjects and emotional stakes.

If anything, the Netflix film could serve as a useful primer for “Last Men in Aleppo,” which assumes a fair bit of knowledge on the audience’s part regarding who the White Helmets are and the circumstances that require them.

Joining “Last Men in Aleppo” as nominees for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary are “Beware the Slenderman” and “Cries From Syria” from HBO, “National Bird” from “Independent Lens” on PBS, and fellow “POV” on PBS candidate “Almost Sunrise.”  “Cries from Syria” also earned nominations for Outstanding Writing, Outstanding Research, and Outstanding Music & Sound, so it has a better chance of winning a statuette than “Last Men in Aleppo.”  Both films are also among numerous nominees about the Syrian Civil War, which I promise to list later.  Right now, I have to go to work, so instead I’ll leave my readers with Last Men in Aleppo | POV | PBS, its official TV preview.

After five years of war in Syria, the remaining citizens of Aleppo are getting ready for a siege. Through the eyes of volunteer rescue workers called the White Helmets, Last Men in Aleppo allows viewers to experience the daily life, death, and struggle in the streets, where they are fighting for sanity in a city where war has become the norm. Winner, 2017 Sundance World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary.

Stay tuned for more News and Documentary Emmy nominees.

There was a lot of drama in the Senate Judiciary Committee today but ultimately they moved on a straight 11-10 party-line vote to approve Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court and send it to the full Senate floor.  The vote was scheduled for 1:30pm but was delayed while Sen. Jeff Flake, a retiring Republican from Arizona, negotiated with other senators in the hallway outside the committee room.

In the end, he cast his deciding vote with the Republicans but he strongly suggested that he would not approve a motion to take up the vote on the Senate floor unless the FBI is given “no more than” a week to look into the allegations of sexual assault made on Thursday before the Judiciary Committee by Dr. Ford. For those unfamiliar with Senate procedure, this is causing a lot of confusion, and it’s not entirely clear what will happen even to many of the senators and their staffs.

The main thing you need to know is that the Republicans will need to pass a motion to begin debate on the nomination and then they’ll need to pass another motion to end debate and have a vote. They cannot do any of those things without at least fifty votes, and Republican Senator Lisa Murkoswski of Alaska has stated that she supports Sen. Flake’s proposal for a week-long FBI investigation. The two of them can stop any further action on the nomination unless their demands are met, so the Republican leadership and White House has no real choice but to do something that will satisfy them.

The next steps could be tricky, however, because it’s not clear what will satisfy them or what is really realistic to expect on such a short timeline. The FBI has many field offices and can conduct interviews fairly quickly if people can be located and are available, but this is a real time crunch.

While the FBI investigation gets up and rolling, obviously the news media will be reporting and interviewing and investigating themselves, so there’s no telling what the set of facts and allegations will be dominating in a week’s time, or even when the clock officially starts on that deadline.

In any case, Sen. Flake seems to have put the brakes on what was a runaway train, and I guess we should thank him for that. Democratic Senator Chris Coons seems to have had a major leadership role in making this delay happen, and he deserves praise for his hard work and effectiveness.

I imagine Brett Kavanaugh is heliotrope with rage, and we now know what that looks like.  I doubt the shock of his testimony will age well, but it’s not clear that we’ll have much more clarity in a week than we have now.

In any case, there is still hope that Kavanaugh will not be confirmed and serve for perhaps forty years on the nation’s highest court, and it looked for a long time on Friday afternoon like all hope was lost.

Thomas Jefferson justified American independence from the British Crown by invoking the concept that no government can be legitimate without the consent of the people it governs.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Occasionally, we hear radical conservatives refer to this clause in the Declaration of Independence as well as another quote from Jefferson, from a letter he wrote from France in 1787 to his friend William Smith: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.” The idea is that violent revolution is justified if the government becomes oppressive.

The 18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume noted that most governments of his age seemed quite capable of governing without anything approximating true consent so long as they didn’t go too far.  In recents years, we’ve seen some examples of what can happen to a despotic government when they don’t show enough restraint. Leaders in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen have been toppled from within, in Libya from without, and in Syria all civil order has dissolved entirely in an effort to preserve an illegitimate regime.

In general, the more oppressive the government, the more force is required to maintain order, and in the former communist world we saw that totalitarianism was a necessary component of the system.  Some despotic societies can provide a decent life (for a time) to their societies, but this is only on the surface and they ultimately invite dissent and resistance, and ultimately violence and terrorism.

The best assurance of a good society is a people governed by a truly self-correcting system, where the people not only have the nominal right to change their leadership but a true and rational belief that they have an actual ability to do so. Representative government is our solution, and it absolutely depends on the people’s willingness to believe that power can be challenged and challenged effectively.

It’s vitally important that people perceive elections to be credible, but it’s also necessary that they accept the results even when their preferred party or candidates lose.  This is a requirement for maintaining civil order. Without this perception, there is a breakdown in consent. People don’t see any reason to obey laws, to respect the police, to accept the rulings of judges, or to suffer any inconvenience or political setback without acting out.

Our country is entering a danger zone on so many fronts. We’ve already suffered through an election decided by a partisan Supreme Court. We’ve endured another election that was heavily impacted by foreign interference. Twice, the popular vote winner has lost a presidential election. Congress has perfected the art of using computer technology to draw districts that protect incumbents– they now essentially choose their voters instead of being chosen by them. Judicial rulings have opened the floodgates of dark money, making it impossible to regulate how campaigns are financed or to prevent powerful interest groups from swamping the power of people-powered movements.  More and more, the people on the margins of society or at the most vulnerable stages of life are seeing their right to vote challenged and their ability to vote complicated.

Now we see the Senate malfunctioning so that it no longer serves its primary purpose of cooling the passions of the House and forcing compromise on a divided nation. Instead, the rules forcing consensus are being obliterated. A candidate like Brett Kavanaugh would never have been nominated if we still had a filibuster for nominations, and he surely would not be confirmed if even the slightest requirement for bipartisan consensus was required.  Most people did not vote for Donald Trump and do not want the kind of Court he and Mitch McConnell are going to give us. But, even more than that, most people cannot fathom how a man like Kavanaugh can be rammed through to confirmation in a process like this. 

I’m not making a personal threat but a simple prediction that we’re entering into a period of social unrest, and the Kavanaugh confirmation is akin to throwing a Molotov cocktail on an already smoldering fire.

We need to be moving in the opposite direction, toward more voter participation, more vulnerable incumbents, more citizen power versus corporate interests, more consensus driven rules, toward more widely acceptable Supreme Court Justices.

But we’re not headed that way.  Kavanaugh will move us in the wrong direction on every single one of these issues, both because of how he will rule on cases before the Court and because of how he was pushed through.

There is nothing approximating consent of the people for this, and that is a recipe for a breakdown of our society.

I have a feeling that you’re watching a certain hearing today. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

This absurd, ongoing “He says/she says” farce surrounding the Kavanaugh appointment is much like demonizing a proven mass murderer for having cheated on his high school math tests. It illustrates the amazing vacuity of the American political system and its media opinion makers perhaps even better than does the whole Trump phenomenon.

Read on for more.

What Brett Kavanaugh Really Learned in High School: Make the Rules, Break the Rules and Prosper – Joann Wypijewski

Brett Kavanaugh cannot prove a negative, his supporters say, and should not be judged on something he may or may not have done when he was a youth. On those two points, they are correct. I might think they were also sincere if the right-wing powers behind him had ever cared about poor people, black and brown people, asylum-seekers, anyone who’s been in prison, any kid being tried as an adult, anyone branded a sex offender, anyone convicted by the press before trial, or by police on the side of the road, or by the architects of Guantanamo–that is, the multitude in the cross-hairs of suspicion, commonly denied equity, due process and the possibility of redemption.

Kavanaugh’s sexual inquisitors are similarly flippant about justice. They ignore the problem of proving a negative and simply declare him a liar; they then focus on the story of Christine Blasey Ford, declare it true and steam ahead, affirming that accusation equals guilt and the bad acts of youth should forever color the life chances of an adult–scourges that those in the cross-hairs mentioned above know intimately. The sophomoric cruelties of Kavanaugh’s partisans, belching from the internet and in live threats, only bolster their opposite number’s argument that man is forever an adolescent. The late-hour accusation by a former Yale classmate has the odor of pile-on, and its flimsiness, in The New Yorker’s new panting approach to reporting, could be used to subvert Ford. I’m tempted to say that when it comes to sexual politics, a lot of grown-ups are acting like high-schoolers, but that would be a slur on youth.

Virtually everything about this spectacle except the tentative, then stoic intervention of Ford reeks of bad faith. Wisdom crouches in the corner, silent. Yet wisdom–have we forgot?–is the fundamental and ancient criterion for a judge. Kavanaugh has failed the test of wisdom not by what he is accused of doing when he was 17 and drunk but by his adult neglect of reflection and his indifference to suffering, something this moment puts in a sharper light. He does not deserve to be on any court, much less the Supreme Court.

That does not get his unwise antagonists off the hook, though.

For anyone who still cares about principle, the Kavanaugh case is not a matter of belief, nor will it come down to proving or disproving Ford’s allegations. The Senate confirmation process is not a court of law. It is, however–in theory if not in fact–an arena for considering the problems and promise of justice, for taking the measure of a man, in this case, and his capacity to think deeply, to search bravely, to act humanely, beyond the limit of mere ambition. Ford’s intervention puts the hard stuff of humanity at the center of that arena, something that has been absent, most strikingly in the Senate’s challenge to Kavanaugh’s greatest ethical failure: his response to torture. For reasons probably of racism (and partly the nature of sex scandal) torture has never raised the temperature of politics or the public to the same fever as sexual accusation. Ford’s entrance and her story, which is so particularly human, so simple yet complex, so weighty with moral dimension, call the profound questions on that subject. (Whether they will have that effect on the Senate is doubtful.)

—snip—

The past does impinge on the present; one should learn something from it. Kavanaugh has had thirty-five years to think about high school, specifically the formative culture of elite men. Thirty-five years to reflect on why so many felt the need to annihilate their personalities, why they were so careless and aggressive, how they thought about girls and sex and, especially, the privilege of breaking rules and getting away with it. It appears now that this former self-described member of the “Rehobeth Police Fan Club” had not thought about it a bit.

If his first statements after Ford went public were typically bland denials vetted by lawyers–variations on “I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation”–he had a chance, in his Fox interview of September 23, to offer some insight on the culture that fortified him and anguished Ford. Martha MacCallum prodded him for any thoughts on women’s expressed experience, on memory, on competing versions of the past, on whether anyone (say, someone who might come before him in court) should forever be judged by youthful behavior. Kavanaugh was a robot. He ventured no ideas, no interest in the human condition, no sense of moral wrestling, even in the abstract. He had his talking points.

Ambition says, Stick to the script; play it safe even at the risk of appearing to be a depthless drone. Wisdom would say otherwise. Intellectual curiosity and a feeling for justice would say otherwise.

When Kavanaugh was assistant White House counsel from 2001-2003, his office was immersed in one of the most momentous debates in this country’s history. His boss, Alberto Gonzales, was seeking legal justifications for torture, for detention without trial, for ignoring the Geneva Conventions and pissing on habeas corpus, the `great writ’, legal obstacle to tyranny since the 12th century. Put another way, the Bush administration was debating how to break the rules and get away with it. At issue was not the anodyne “power of the president” but the power to inflict pain.

Even before the confirmation hearings began there was much attention to Kavanaugh’s record over this period: the documents withheld or belatedly released, the secrets yet to know, the points to be scored as Spartacus. So many were so busy posturing that they forgot that the most important answers were not to be found in records, however illuminating, but in this nominee’s ability to address the question: Where is justice to be found in the contest between the mighty and the meanest, as Solomon put it; and how do the just respond in the face of suffering?

By simply entering the arena, a person in pain, Ford casts in shadow all the procedural wrangle and makes plain that which has been obfuscated on a host of issues but on torture most acutely, and aptly in Kavanaugh’s case: the human person and the exercise of power. The figure of the person–how many thousands gone? (and, no, I am not equating Ford’s experience with anyone else’s)–prompts a different consideration of the record, one grounded not in documents but in ethics, human sympathy, where the issue of torture always belonged but which has been obscured by two decades parsing the intricacies of cruelty: how much pain? to the point of organ failure? who was in charge? who authorized? who was in the loop? Shifting the focus lights up Kavanaugh’s deficits, though hardly his alone.

Kavanaugh has long repeated he “was not involved” in US torture policy, and technically he was not authorized even to know about it. “I don’t recall having any conversations with Brett about torture,” Gonzales has said. But of course he knew something about it; everyone knew something, if only by watching CNN in January of 2002 as masked US soldiers met prisoners from Afghanistan coming off a plane in Guantanamo–orange jumpsuits, manacles, turquoise hoods over their faces. The men had been chained to the plane for 8,000 miles. We know Kavanaugh was involved in at least one heated discussion about denying detainees legal representation. He is not reported to be among those who got heated, and years later on the federal bench, he would deny a habeas corpus petition from a Guantanamo prisoner in Bihani v. Obama (flouting the Court on which he hopes to sit in the process by arguing that the US government has no obligations under international law that haven’t been codified by domestic statute).

—snip—

Kavanaugh was willing to accommodate suffering. How many additional meetings he may have been in is incidental. More, his “not involved” involvement is either gutless evasion or further evidence of an incurious mind, a profound apathy toward knowing, questioning, reasoning independently. In 2004, as the president’s staff secretary, he was copied on a White House email outlining a public relations strategy saying Bush “has never considered authorizing torture under any circumstances.” It was a lie, put about after an infamous “torture memo” was revealed in the press. Kavanaugh told the Senate in 2006 that he hadn’t known of the memo until it was leaked; maybe so, but once he did know he had a chance to intervene, to oppose the deception at least, and he did not. He accommodated deception.

Torture was officially an embarrassment by 2006 (though still in use). Ambitious for a judgeship, Kavanaugh was safe telling the Senate, “I do not agree with the legal analysis in the memorandum, including with respect to the definition of torture.” Ambitious for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court this year, he flattered Senator Dianne Feinstein for her report on the CIA torture program; then he declined to say what he thought about Trump’s advocacy of waterboarding and worse, danced around a question on the Bush torture policy and presented himself as a mere paper-pusher for a 2005 signing statement in which Bush declared that he could ignore the congressional prohibition of torture that he’d just autographed. “It would’ve crossed my desk,” Kavanaugh said of the statement, relying again on the benefits of playing the dimwit. Feinstein tired of the exchange, which Kavanaugh capped with a bow to the importance of “backbone.”

Except for a handful of low-level working-class soldiers, everyone who ordered, justified, implemented or looked the other way at the torture policy got away with it. The elite white men and women got a step up. George Bush got to paint all day at his ranch. Gina Haspel got to be CIA director. Jay Bybee, who signed the memos authorizing torture, got to be a federal judge, just like Kavanaugh. Harvard used to tell its students, “You are the best and the brightest,” the future ruling class. I don’t know what it tells them now or how Yale greeted Kavanaugh, but the vital lesson he seems to have taken from Georgetown Prep is a corollary to Harvard’s: the ruling class makes the rules and breaks them and prospers in blameless irresponsibility.

You could be cynical about it and joke that with Kavanaugh at least there’s truth in advertising, but again the figure in pain enters to cut the laughter. Titan and CACI, multimillion-dollar private security contractors, had translators and interrogators who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. They got away with it, too. Kavanaugh gave them the pass. He joined the opinion of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals that not only prevented Iraqi victims from suing the corporations in civil court but established sweeping immunity from liability for private contractors in battle arenas into the future. The language of the opinion is obtuse, antiseptic; the reader may be forgiven for forgetting what the case is about. It took Merrick Garland, in dissent, to recognize the suffering subject–the human person beaten, blinded, humiliated, strung up, shocked, raped, forced to watch his father die, extinguished. No one would be held to account. Kavanaugh washed his hands.

Now, pitying himself, he says he wants his dignity. He abdicated that long before anyone heard Christine Blasey Ford’s name.

Why are we not hearing about this!!! It massively dwarfs a horny 17-year old boy’s supposed drunken fumbling at a party that is essentially unprovable 30+ years later.

Of course, the answer is plain to anyone who is not living in some kind of media-produced deep trance state.

Both political parties and almost all of their leaders are as guilty as is Kavanaugh…more guilty, actually, because Kavanaugh really was just another paper pusher at the time while they were the movers, shakers and protagonists in this set of crimes…and they should be publicly branded as war criminals just as certainly as should the past U.S. leaders who authorized the maniacal destruction of much of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and the more recent criminals who have savaged the American dream since Bush II’s reign.

But we can’t let that happen, right?

Riiiiiight…

Who would lead us?

Sigh…

P.S. Thank you JoAnn Wypijewski.

You pinned it!!!

Welcome back, music lovers. It’s Wednesday somewhere, yeah? Seems like the long week and even longer day is something of a running theme. What can I say. But enough of me rambling. You are here for some tunes.

I’ve been more in the mood for chillout music So here’s some Eno that I haven’t posted before.

I’ll try to post up a few more vids over the next couple days. More to come. In the meantime, keep calm. We’ll get through this together. Stay tuned.