RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lindsey-graham-says-stop-1538089494

The U.S. Senate is sometimes called “the Club.” No Member in our time more personifies the Club than South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. On Thursday at the Kavanaugh hearing, he dropped out.

When his turn arrived to question Brett Kavanaugh, Senator Graham instead stared across the long table at the Judiciary Committee’s Democrats and, well, unloaded. He called their tactics against Judge Kavanaugh “the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.” A moment’s pause and then this: “Boy, do you want power, and I hope you never get it.”

What caused Lindsey Graham to pop?

A phrase rolling through the Kavanaugh confirmation story the past few weeks is character assassination. It is an ugly thing, and most of the time American politics stops short of defeating an opponent solely by tearing him apart personally and then using the damage to his reputation as a pretext to defeat him.

By the midday recess of Thursday’s hearing, that manifestly was the Democrats’ strategy. The hearing made clear that Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation was not going to be corroborated. But the Democrats’ real interest wasn’t Ms. Ford. It was Judge Kavanaugh. The informal standards of the Senate Club were shattered Thursday by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hirono, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.

One Democratic Senator after another took the allotted time to say Ms. Ford had been the victim of a sexual predator, specifically Judge Kavanaugh. None bothered to say the acts were “alleged.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/confirm-brett-kavanaugh-1538089143

Thursday’s Senate hearing on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination was an embarrassment that should have never happened. Judge Kavanaugh was right to call the confirmation process a “disgrace” in his passionate self-defense, and whatever one thinks of Christine Blasey Ford’s assault accusation, she offered no corroboration or new supporting evidence.

Ms. Ford certainly was a sympathetic witness—by her own admission “terrified” at the start and appearing to be emotionally fragile. Her description of the assault and its impact on her was wrenching. She clearly believes what she says happened to her. Her allegation should have been vetted privately, in confidence, as she said she would have preferred. Instead ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein held it for six weeks and it was leaked—perhaps to cause precisely such a hearing circus.

Yet there is still no confirming evidence beyond her own testimony, and some of what she says has been contradicted. The female friend Ms. Ford says was at the home the night of the assault says she wasn’t there. The number of people she says were there has varied from four to five and perhaps more, but every potential witness she has cited by name says he or she doesn’t recall the party.

She still can’t recall the home where the assault took place, how she got there or how she got home that evening. She has no witnesses who say she told them about the alleged assault at the time—until she first spoke of it at a couples therapy session 30 years later in 2012. Mr. Kavanaugh’s name doesn’t appear in the notes of her therapist.

https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/rabbi-aryeh-spero/rabbi-spero-women-teenage-sons-and-daughters-will-support-kavanaugh

Chuck Schumer, the Democrats, and their spokespeople in the Senate seem to be spooking-out certain Republicans with a threat that if Republicans vote for Judge Brett Kavanaugh they will lose the support of women in their constituency.

However, the tens of millions of women who currently have or have previously raised teenage boys, and even teenage girls, will probably be alarmed if a precedent is set in a Senate confirmation vote that would penalize or snuff out the opportunities of a fully grown man who did something foolish while yet a minor or was accused of something that was never verified with any surety.

Parents of boys and girls lovingly sacrifice their life’s energies, time, and money so that their children will have a bright future – economic, social, and familial. And all parents, since they themselves were once young, know of the mistakes teenagers make or the non-mistakes that merely involve rowdiness. What a frightening and demoralizing thing it would be to parents if after thirty years of proper and refined living and accomplishment by their children, a new American convention is established by the Senate that all lifetime achievements can be wiped away by a single instance in their child’s life. A person’s life, their child’s life, can be destroyed by an accusation, especially if it craftily summons-up whatever happens to be the politically correct, avant-garde sin of that given era.

Today’s Democrats play dirty, despicably dirty. In their quest for personal power, riches, and control over all aspects of American civic life, Democrats will equally play dirty tricks against conservative women running for office, bringing up or fabricating events from when they were once teenage girls, charging them from that full basket of the new Seven Sins: racism, intolerance, nationalism, whiteness, Christian Evangelicalism, Islamophobia, and anti-LBTG. We have seen them reach into this basket on many occasions. The Democrats have been successful in concocting false narratives that most often, in the court of public opinion, end up beating facts and the truth. For them, winning is everything, the only thing that counts.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/09/27/kavanaugh-ford-hearing-in-awful-process-democrats-gain-advantage-as-republicans-walk-on-eggshells.html

The testimony of Christine Blasey Ford before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was a plus for Democrats who want to derail the nomination, because Republicans were walking on eggshells.

The 11 Republican senators on the committee – all men – clearly did not want to appear to be bullying Ford or to look like they were being accusatory or insensitive toward a woman who claims she was a victim of sexual assault committed by Kavanaugh when the two were in high school.

Ford came across as earnest, likeable through her nervousness, and seemed to do her best to answer questions from both sides during her testimony.

But it’s a fact that there is no corroboration of her version of the sexual assault she says happened about 36 years ago (she said she is not sure of the exact year). And when you take a step back, aspects of her account do not make sense under any objective examination.

At the end of the testimony, Mitchell laughed with Ford, commiserating with her about how bad the hearing format was. All of this strengthened Ford’s standing and made her a more sympathetic figure.

For example, Ford (about 15 at the time) obviously needed a ride home right after the alleged assault. But she could not or would not say who took her home or what she said to that person in the immediate aftermath of what she said was a sexual assault.

Republicans faced a two-fold problem at the hearing.

First, Rachel Mitchell, the experienced prosecutor to whom Republicans ceded their five-minute questioning rounds, treated the proceeding as if she was taking a deposition from Ford. Attorneys routinely take depositions – statements under oath – to be presented as evidence during trials or hearings.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ford-most-indelible-memory-of-alleged-attack-is-uproarious-laughter-of-kavanaugh-friend/

WASHINGTON — Christine Blasey Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee today that the most “indelible” memory she has of her alleged assault and attackers in high school is “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”

Ford told the committee she did not mix up Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge with other teens at the time.

“The person that was blamed for the incident is actually the person who introduced me to them originally. So he was a member of Columbia Country Club,” she said of the middle-school teacher named in Ed Whelan’s Twitter doppelganger theory. “And I don’t want to talk about him because I think it’s unfair, but he is the person that introduced me to them.”

Ford said under questioning from Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) that she remembers Kavanaugh and Judge “were laughing with each other.”

“I was, you know, underneath one of them while the two laughed — two friends having a really good time with one another,” she said.

Ford testified that she had one beer and “Brett and Mark were visibly drunk” when they pushed her into a bedroom and turned up loud music.

“Brett got on top of me. He began running his hands over my body and grinding into me. I yelled, hoping that someone downstairs might hear me, and I tried to get away from him, but his weight was heavy,” the Palo Alto, Calif., professor said. “Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes. He had a hard time, because he was very inebriated, and because I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit underneath my clothing. I believed he was going to rape me.”

“I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This is what terrified me the most, and has had the most lasting impact on my life,” she said. “It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”

Ford testified that “Brett’s assault on me drastically altered my life,” and “for a very long time, I was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone these details.”

“I did not want to tell my parents that I, at age 15, was in a house without any parents present, drinking beer with boys,” she added. “I convinced myself that because Brett did not rape me, I should just move on and just pretend that it didn’t happen.”

She said the incident was revealed to her husband in a 2012 therapy session because he couldn’t understand why she was insisting on a second front door in their home remodel. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/27/watch-lindsey-graham-tear-democrats-to-shreds-at-kavanaugh-hearing/

‘What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open, and hope you win in 2020. … This is the most unethical sham since I’ve seen in politics.’

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham eviscerated his Democratic colleagues for their behavior on Thursday at the hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Shortly after several Democratic senators urged Kavanaugh to call off the confirmation process until the FBI could investigate the allegations of sexual assault made against him, Graham chided them by saying they could have asked the FBI to look into the matter themselves.

“If you wanted an FBI investigation, you could have come to us,” Graham said to his Democratic colleagues. “What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open, and hope you win in 2020. You’ve said that! Not me. … When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them Lindsey said ‘Hello,’ because I voted for them. I’d never do to them what you’ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I’ve seen in politics and if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to this guy.”

The more this information comes out, the more the public can understand what’s really going on with the debate over treatment for gender dysphoria.

Transgender activists and their hard-left political supporters have erected a wall of propaganda to block any objections founded in science, reality, or genuine compassion for sufferers of gender dysphoria. In a testament to their political skill, these activists have managed to shut down biologically based responses to their remarkable argument that gender is unrelated to biology and can be changed at will. But cracks in the wall are starting to show.

First came online discussion groups for parents whose teenagers (primarily girls) suddenly announced they were “trans” and asked for medical intervention to attain a masculine appearance. Websites such as 4thWaveNow and Transgender Trend (in the United Kingdom) allowed parents to compare notes about their remarkably similar experiences with this “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD)—when an average teen gets involved with “trans”-identifying individuals, usually peers, then discovers via Internet videos that whatever adolescent stresses she’s experiencing are certainly due to gender dysphoria and can be resolved with cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgery.

Then came a study from Dr. Lisa Littman at Brown University, demonstrating that such psychological and environmental factors can indeed contribute to ROGD. Although the transgender activists swung into action and, to no one’s surprise, bullied Brown into removing the press release about the study and otherwise groveling, the truth the study illumined lingers. Troubled parents now have scientific validation that they’re not crazy for believing their daughters are girls and their sons are boys—and for resisting the imposition of harmful, perhaps irreversible medical treatments.

Hard on the heels of the Brown controversy came news from the U.K, where the government “equalities minister” ordered an investigation into the reasons for the enormous increase (4,500 percent over a decade) in girls seeking so-called gender reassignment. The government wants to determine causes and “long-term impacts” of the phenomenon.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/10/15/kirsten-gillibrands-calculated-convictions/

Friend of Bill yesterday, ‘Me Too’ stalwart today

In the Senate, you’re either a work­horse or a show horse. Kirsten Gillibrand, despite the dynamism with which she pushed into law such blockbuster legislation as the Merchant Marine Academy Improvement Act of 2017 and her noble fight for the Quiet Communities Act of 2018 (which stands a 5 percent chance of passing, according to Skopos Labs), doesn’t seem much like a workhorse. It used to be said among New York newspaper reporters that the most dangerous place to be was between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera. Now Schumer is the shy one in the New York senatorial delegation.

Gillibrand’s publicity-seeking engine is forever running, and the sound it makes is Notice me notice me notice me. She even voted against James Mattis as secretary of defense: Leave the Pentagon rudderless to own Trump? Sure, whatever. She cast the only vote in opposition to Mattis. As of early this year, she’d voted against Trump more than twice as often as Schumer had. Though she denied (this was a year and a half ago) that she is running for president in 2020, a Washington Post headline on a piece tracking her behavior this year read, “It sure looks as if Kirsten Gillibrand is running for president.”

At least that’s the way it looks to you and me. The way it looks to Mr. and Mrs. U.S. Voter is: Who the heck is Kirsten Gillibrand? An August Politico poll found that should she be the Democratic nominee against Donald Trump, he would win only 29 percent of the vote. Um . . . yay? Except Gillibrand received 24 percent in the same poll. Forty-seven percent were undecided. Michael Avenatti managed to get 20 percent, and no one had even heard of him until about six months ago. Hence Gillibrand’s nonstop effort to get in front of the cameras: Notice me notice me notice me.

Gillibrand is always up for a quote, no matter how half-thought or appalling. When lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford spent two days arguing that their client couldn’t possibly come and testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee until a nice leisurely FBI investigation had concluded — before dumping that excuse and moving on to others — Gillibrand made a beeline for the news crews. Though Ford did not allege a federal crime, which made the demand for FBI involvement look like an obvious slow­down tactic, Gillibrand said the dispute obviously indicated that Ford was telling the truth and Judge Kavanaugh was lying. “Someone who is lying does not ask the FBI to investigate their claims,” she said. “Who is not asking the FBI to investigate these claims? The White House. Judge Kavanaugh has not asked to have the FBI review these claims. Is that the reaction of an innocent person? It is not.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-anonymous-allegation-amid-bungled-process/

Grassley could have told committee Democrats that, having abused the process, they had waived the right to present more evidence.

My main concerns all along about the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing have been (1) abuse of the process and (2) relatedly, the more delay you permit, the more delay you will have — which matters when one side’s objective is, precisely, delay.

Following Wednesday’s Avenatti circus, ably chronicled in our editorial, there has now been a fourth allegation lodged against Judge Kavanaugh. This one is wholly anonymous, coming into the office of Senator Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) with no attribution and no contact information. According to NBC News, the letter alleges that in 1998, an inebriated Kavanaugh, then 33 years old and a partner at a prominent D.C. law firm, got rough with an unidentified woman outside a Washington bar.

The woman making the accusation is not the woman who was allegedly assaulted; nor did she even see the alleged assault. She claims, instead, that she is the mother of a friend of the victim. The friend is said to have witnessed the incident — in which the victim was “shoved . . . up against the wall very aggressively and sexually,” whatever that means.

The complainant maintains that there were at least four witnesses, including her daughter, all of whom were drinking. None of them, nor the victim (described as “still traumatized” after 20 years), has come forward or identified anyone involved.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/27/the-truths-

Are there any guiding principles that can make sense of the sensational news that now overwhelms the senses seemingly every hour?

What is common to blaring headlines about the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings, an anti-Trump “resistance” buried deep in the permanent bureaucracy and the improper behavior by top officials of the Obama administration, FBI, and Department of Justice?

There are a few subtexts to all these spectacles, scandals, and melodramas.

First, those in power had never imagined that Donald Trump either could or should win the 2016 election.

That reality emboldened federal employees to take risks and step over the line in efforts to ensure that Trump would be humiliated at the polls. Officials assumed that incoming President Hillary Clinton would either overlook or reward their zealotry.

FBI kingpins such as James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok either broke the law or made a mockery of the FBI’s ethical guidelines. They acted as if Clinton would win, or should have won, the election.

Had Clinton won the presidency, we would have absolutely no knowledge of any prior misconduct at the FBI, the Department of Justice, the National Security Agency or the CIA under the Obama administration. Trump prompted all that hysteria by winning.

Second, both the Democratic and Republican establishments, as well as the proverbial “deep state” bureaucracy, agreed that President Trump was so crude and uncouth that he must not continue in office.

The idea that any means necessary were justified by the noble ends of destroying Trump explains everything from the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times detailing formal White House resistance to Trump’s governance, to Bob Woodward’s latest unsourced expose of purported Trump chaos, to Robert Mueller’s investigation that was mandated to find “Russian collusion” and has ended up desperate to find any crimes that might prove Trump guilty of something.

Third, had Trump simply failed, as predicted, there would be far less frenzy. His Democratic opponents and many in his own party would have quietly found ways to remove him.

But instead, the economy is booming in a way previously unseen in the 21st century, with near-record-low unemployment and stock market highs. The economy is growing faster than it has in years. Domestic energy production is also hitting record highs.