methodical

Idk, these rules are hard to understand since they keep changing. It's like 90s cell phone contract fine print. "Your minutes are only good on the 3rd friday of the month after 11pm until 2am."

Idk it was at a hotel though right, not technically a restaurant.

Check out this guy, apparently has never heard of JFK.

They need to stop calling them "impressionable" and start using the non PC terms for them, since that's all they'll understand. Gullible Idiots. That's what they are, that will cherry pick whatever their propaganda machine serves them up and get outraged about it. EVERYONE, on both sides, unless they are a nut-ball are outraged about most of the list. But personally, I find it hard to care if any representative (R or D) can't go out to dinner with the public if they spend their days s#!tting on them and policies they depend on, they absolutely need to know how the things they do affects the citizens of the country and most of them insulate themselves from the public so they can live in their own little bubble and pretend everyone agrees with them on everything.

I hope you're prepared to go toe to toe on bird law!

If he's all those things, then there was absolutely no reason for republicans to restrict who the FBI could contact or what they could look at in a follow up investigation to clear his name. He might've been falsely accused, but we'll never know, and republicans doing that made sure that he'll forever have an asterisk by his name and half the country will view him as a drunk frat boy, attempted rapist, liar, and partisan political operative. At best only one of those things *might* not be true.

Gloat all you want, but that isn't something to be proud of, tomorrow they'll delegitimized the court in over half the country's eyes. That was the last part of the government that people still had a reasonable amount of faith in. It'll be a bad day for this country on balance. Congrats on sticking it to us though.

Probably as seriously as any decent person would take senators in a hearing in front of a separate and equal branch of the government that he's basically interviewing for a job with. To be clear though none of them outright accused him of anything during questioning, and even before the questions had started he came out directing rage at them and blaming "the Clintons." Which everyone seems to now be an agent of the Clintons if they don't bend the knees for the Donald or want to see an actual process that isn't influenced by people in the senate and whitehouse holding their thumbs on the scales wile pushing for the confirmation as fast as possible so nobody looks behind the curtain.

I watched it, he testified at length by dodging the democratic senator's questions as he raged at them like a teenager caught in a lie inbetween republican senators disingenuously decrying the process that was a farce because of their own "investigation," long before that day, and then fellatiating him instead of asking questions. LOL, parroting Ric? we've been over that many times before.

There's been several republican senate run that were obviously a formality designed to look at nothing and push their man through. Then there's been the FBI "investigation" that was limited in scope to a few people surrounding two of the 3 accusers, without any questioning of Kavanaugh or Ford, or other accusers or people happy to detail his lying to the senate. These were investigations in the same way a banana republic would investigate, "Ohh we looked almost nowhere, and we found nothing. Big surprise, now shut up peasant and move along." The US is as corrupt as any third world country at this point, lead by people that don't even care to hide it anymore, because they know they have 1/3rd of the electorate that will blindly support them and only seem to get more energized the worse they show themselves to be.

It's fine we can't agree. I'm curious what happens after generations of assets like real-estate get passed down from one family member to another in perpetuity? what about when you include the gains and any other purchases? America's been around for 250 years round about and we've had single families that have been passed down wealth equivalent to something like 4x Bill Gates's wealth. What does the end result become when they aren't families that have a gilded age sense of class based social responsibility or aren't private about their influence, do we now live with the koch's and soros's buying influence and steering the debate from beyond the grave for the rest of the countries existence? I'd agree with you that for things like active non-purely investment vehicle tax dodging companies a succession plan that isn't a huge penalty would be reasonable, but the reasonable thing to me if we got rid of the estate tax would be to make up for it by actually taxing the wealthy before death... and that's a non-starter to many if not most republicans also. So while not ideal, this tax allows the wealthy to grow their wealth much more during a lifetime, for a tax burden on that potentially larger amount later. Like most things tax wise it's a trade off, one more that we're slowly eroding away with no thought as to why it was put in place in the first place.

Well its exempt, up to like 5.5 million now before it's even touched, and the rate used to be as high as 77%. Personally I have no problem with it, even at the higher rate, but I doubt it was ever not "dodged" by the ultra-wealthy through trusts and whatever else. I don't like the idea of American royalty though.

So nice someone is finally calling out those huge corporations!

Yeah this isn't JUST delay tactics and when the fbi does background checks it interviews friends/family and acquaintances at the time. It doesn't dig into the past much unless its either criminal record or financial. So its very likely that if these women were silently bearing the burden of these things it wouldn't have ever been see by any previous investigation. Even if it was just to delay, which I don't believe it all of it is necessarily disagree that some of it is, but why does that matter? If these alleged incidents prove true what-so-ever does this man deserve to be promoted to the highest court? Have you watched any of the hearings, I ask because you see that when D senators were asking for further investigation they simply shut them down. This isn't a different set of rules. This is him interviewing with the senate for a seat on the highest court of the land and having people from his past see that step forward to say "wait no this isn't the type of person you want on the court because he's done things in his past that should disqualify him from steering the direction of justice in this country." And there it is, it scares you, but it shouldn't for your livelihood unless you're doing inappropriate things with students or putting yourself in positions where it seems like you are, those claims are investigated and not publicly on a national scale. It should scare you for your children and the lives they are going to have when you aren't there to protect them, because perpetuating the way things are and have been devalues their personal autonomy, especially for women, and leads them into having bear the shame emotional scars of sexual assault, abuse, and rape. The statistics on it are like 1 in 71 men are raped in their lives, 1 in 3 women are victims of sexual violence and 1 in 5 are raped and almost 2/3 cases of rape are never reported to authorities. This isn't a case where calling for the status-quo is sustainable.

It's going to be a watershed moment for the country even more-so than the #metoo stuff has been so far and the GOP and those blindly supporting them are either going to bury their heads in the sand and look even more like monsters at the end of this or they are going to have to change. This week has touched more of a nerve than any celebrity #metoo moment, IMO. This was a stunning miscalculation by republicans to try and speed this guy through. I'm sure by now everyone's seen those women corner Jeff Flake in an elevator today, this is years, and decades of repressed rage coming out and I don't think it's even close to over. Here's a Yale classmate speaking about how they have similarities in their lives, except she was raped by an upperclassmen who apparently had done this to more women than just her. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/28/opinions/kavanaugh-hearing-brought-back-assault-jennifer-taub/index.html?no-st=1538199460 Here's another DC prep school girl from the late 80s describing how the New Yorker article that details how Kavanaugh's best friend's girlfriend had heard Mark Judge describe what was a gang rape he participated in where he and other boys queued up and had sex with a drunk girl, and how that brought up memories of parties where the same things were happening witnessed by her and her classmates. https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/09/kavanaugh-judge-prep-school-parties.html And Michael Avenatti is still promising to come forward with corroborating witnesses to the gang-rape allegation in the next few days. Which, if credible, I'm sure the FBI will want to discuss that. Even without criminal charges a plausible corroborated rape allegation against Kavanaugh would be not just a nomination killer but a career ender as well. If any of these things were things he's actually done and he didn't withdraw his name, he'll have nobody to blame but himself, well I guess maybe the republicans that tried to push him through and kept supporting him as well. As human with empathy (I question that this exists in congress) this stuff is heartbreaking and I don't think on capital hill there's any way any republican but Jeff Flake can come out of this looking like he's not a villain that blindly supports any man over any women. Hopefully this catharsis finds these victims of sexual assault and rape some solace. But I don't think this anger is going away if they break for a week and then try to shove him through again.

More to BRB, but Nothing in Clinton's history as a smarmy sleezeball, accused rapist, and intern-molester is acceptable not then and not now but at the time there was a bunch of "well yeah but, republican X did Y" too... There was also a lot of pearl clutching and family values lecturing by the R's back then and we've seen how hollow that has rang over the last 20 years. This what-about-ism is ridiculous, as if keeping a running tally of what the other side got away with is somehow going to balance the scales and everything will turn out okay. All of these people should be held accountable, period. Preferably immediately at the time of the crime, but that's just not the way it works, unfortunately. It's easy to look back now through the lense of history and see that Clinton was wrong and should have been removed. It's also easy to look back through that same lense of history right now and see that Brett Kavanaugh doesn't have the temperament to be a supreme court justice, nor the honesty, nor the alter-boy history he wants to claim. Right now Republicans have lost their damned minds and made a Faustian bargain that Trump is going to get them to the promised land or something by bringing the religions vote, the gun vote, the uneducated, rural and the neo-nazi vote together and allow them to stack the deck against the next generations because they see where their power is going to go. They've been willing to overlook their candidates and party members for racism, sexism, sexual assault, encouraging violence, being sexual predators against minors, etc. This is yet another case where they want to leave ALL stones unturned and hope the American public shuts the hell up and forgets about it while they push another good ole boy into power. It's not the same as "ohh hey back in the 90s the Dems did X with Bill Clinton." Even if it were, that sort of whataboutism isn't relevant. Yeah the democrats back then did that, but that wouldn't fly anymore and if it did they'd lose a lot of supporters and I know cause I'd be one of the first ones out the door.

If the same thing happened to a family member, I would have told them they should withdraw, and I'd be pissed at them for the media circus they'd be causing that would undoubtedly be interfering with my normal life. I'd publicly press for further investigation by a independent body if they didn't and maintained their innocence, because if there's nothing to hide that'd obviously clear them. If I saw them lie their ass off in front of the senate about their drinking and "inside jokes", I'd call that out too. It's a shame smart phones didn't exist back then. We'd undoubtedly have a facebook full of video that would instantly disqualify this man from his current job, let alone the SCOTUS. Look, undeniable proof isn't what is needed here, this wasn't a trial. This is simply republicans trying to shove in a alcoholic, lying, partisan hack and probably would-be sex offender if he wasn't a member of the affluent, christian, white, entitled boys club into the SCOTUS regardless of any doubts about his character. At this point its probably half to show they can and half because they don't give a f#&% what anyone thinks because if you aren't one of them or a billionaire donors you don't f#&%ing matter to them. I'd be embarrassed if he was a family member of mine, or any republican senator involved was. I'd tell them this is the world they are helping to perpetuate in the face of their own mothers, sisters and daughers. For what? a "good work" from the slim-ball McConnell? That's the legacy they're going to leave, a suck-up to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, I'd make sure to carve that into their tombstone so history accurately portrays them as the coward they were in their own time. Family doesn't mean blind allegiance.

How they didn't realize that it was going to make them look like a bunch of chinken-s#!ts that don't have the mental ability nor intestinal fortitude to do their job is astounding, unless of course that's exactly what they are.

I noticed this stuff with my father when he went far right wing nut job. They only see the worst in people and world around them and the worst people they know are themselves. So when he'd say things like that, I just added this at the end in my head ", because that's what I'd be doing." at the end and it made sense. It was repugnant, but it explains a lot about their mentality, its projection.

I can't understand what their calculus is here. Are there actually enough entitled narcissistic men that they make up enough of the vote that doubling down on this is worth it somehow? Is this another case like Roy Moore where being republican and anti-abortion is their sole qualification needed for these people and it's better the rapist you know than literally anyone else? How in the hell are people like Orin Hatch and Chuck Grassley still there? It should be embarrassing for their supporters and states, that's right I'm side-eyeing you council bluffs...

I feel like someone has to explain water to him every time a hurricane hits and I imagine him sitting there going "No way! really? it does that!?! how much water did you say!? wow!" Then he runs off to the press to tell them about these new mystifying properties of water. Big wet water.

Perhaps bad phrasing on my part, but my drunken "stupid decisions" in my younger years are in no way near the level of forcing someone into a room with a friend blocking the door then assaulting them. so when I say I'd expect "stupid decisions" to follow me they aren't anywhere near that level, just general embarrassing actions. To be absolutely clear: I wouldn't categorize sexual assault as a stupid decision, its a serious crime, and if it came across as I was minimizing it that was the opposite of my intention.

I'm right there with you, I wouldn't want to be judged for drunken stupidity even in my 20s. The difference is I have no illusions that I could make it through the vetting process of high profile public service, nor would I deserve to be appointed to the supreme court. I'd fully expect my stupid decisions to follow me if I was in a position to try. In order to get a lifetime seat on the highest court in the land, probably yes, it should be taken into account. It's stuck with the victim this long obviously, and she was still discussing it in therapy 6 years ago, and if it's true, he caused that trauma. Obviously its not a criminal matter at this point, but I'd say yes, that being appointed to the supreme court should be for people who were self aware enough in high school to not do anything like the sexual assault he's accused of. It's not going to matter to the senate republicans and he'll likely get appointed anyways unless the senate has a guilty conscious about Clarence Thomas (who also shouldn't be serving on the highest court in the land), but were I a republican woman I'd be asking myself "Why do so many of the men my party supports have a history of sexual violence and lack of respect for women?" when that happens.

Agreed. All these self inflicted mistakes can be overcome by a amazing team, but will knock a good team to a mediocre team and a mediocre team to a god awful team and right now they are sitting right around mediocre and closing in on god awful. Part of that is QB depth, but also stupid penalties that save drives for the other team or kill their own and holding onto the ball. Only one of those they can't really help, which is what makes it frustrating, and both those things have been a problem for years. Hopefully with added depth and competition comes more accountability for bone-headed mistakes.

it's being reported that in the courtroom the prosecutors said that he agreed to a cooperation agreement. I imagine we have a category 5 storm incoming to twitter this weekend.