Lindsey Graham is a sanctimonious weasel

I have long had a deep contempt for senator Lindsey Graham. He is like the late John McCain, an extreme warmonger who pretends to be an independent person but when it comes to actions is an utterly dependable, extreme rightwing Republican party apparatchik. He is matched only by former senator Joe Lieberman in the ability to get favorable media attention by uttering sanctimonious pieties while advancing odious policies. No wonder the three of them were such close friends.
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Great moments in hyperbole

John Cox is a Republican running for the governorship of the state of California. The current governor Jerry Brown is a Democrat and the state legislature has majority Democrats. So Cox naturally tries to paint the state as in a mess that requires a change in leadership. But his statement to someone he met inside the Sacramento office of the Department of Motor Vehicles was a doozie.

“You know, I met a Holocaust survivor in Long Beach,” Cox said to a man waiting inside. “He survived concentration camps, and he said this was worse. He’s 90 years old and he had to wait four hours down in Long Beach. Can you imagine that?”

First of all, I cannot imagine a Holocaust survivor ever making such a comparison. In fact, Cox later said that he had confused what the man had said, and that was that the DMV reminded him of the long lines seen in pre-World War II Germany and Latvia.

But supposing Cox did think the man had said something vaguely similar to that, I cannot imagine how anyone would take it seriously enough to actually repeat it.

Amazon’s destructive business and labor practices

Bernie Sanders has been hammering away at the fact that because companies like Amazon pay such low wages, the taxpayer has to subsidize their workers through things like SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. He has proposed legislation to tax the companies for the cost of the benefits. His group has put out a short video describing the working conditions which Amazon workers experience.

Amazon has responded.

Stupid old men tricks

Yesterday I wrote about the weird Twitter stream of Ed Whelan, a prominent conservative lawyer and friend and ally of Brett Kavanaugh, who concocted an elaborate theory that Christine Blasey Ford was confused and that the person who sexually assaulted and attempted to rape her at a party when she was 15 was another man who was also a friend and classmate of Kavanaugh’s. Ford has flatly denied that she was confused since she said that she knew both Kavanaugh and the other man.
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Watch this ad to the end

This campaign ad in a congressional race in Arizona for Democrat Steven David Brill, who is running against Republican opponent Paul Gosar, looks pretty run-of-the-mill until you get to the end.

I am guessing that Thanksgiving dinner for the Gosar clan is going to be somewhat strained.

Great moments in bad ideas

Have you ever had the feeling that you have discovered something really important and new and exciting, wondered why no one else had not thought of it before, and couldn’t wait to tell it to the world but on checking carefully realized that the great idea was wrong, or even worse, utterly stupid? If you were lucky, you arrived at the realization before you broadcast the news. But that was more likely to happen before Twitter where people are able to post their half-baked theories as soon as it enters their head and then have to backtrack later.
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Fighting back against the anti-woman Republican party

It looks like the Republicans are hoping that their rejection of a request for an investigation of Christine Blasey Ford’s claims of attempted rape by Supreme Court nominee and their demand for her written testimony by Friday morning will result in her not attending the hearings. That will enable them to avoid the spectacle of eleven Republican men on the Senate judiciary committee openly expressing skepticism about the claims of a woman that she was sexually assaulted by a man. They are also likely fearful that the longer this process goes, the more likely it is that other damaging revelations will emerge, as is often the case when the dike of silence against a powerful person is breached.
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Civil asset forfeiture and race

I have mentioned before the menace of civil asset forfeitures, where police can seize the assets of people even before they are convicted of any crime and make it well nigh impossible for them to get it back even if they are completely innocent. This has become just another way for local jurisdictions to raise money to fund their operations, particularly their police departments. Kevin Drum discusses a new study that looks at which particular jurisdictions are more likely to indulge in this practice. The result should come as no surprise to those who have been following this issue.
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More details emerge about Kavanaugh

The Republican strategy with the Brett Kavanuagh nomination is clear: Quickly have hearings that feature only Kavanuagh and his accuser Christine Blasey Ford, declare that it is a ‘he said, she said’ stalemate, decide that Kavanaugh’s denials are credible, and vote him in. But as a quintet of former prosecutors have pointed out, there are many ways to get further than just two conflicting testimonies, but this requires investigation by an independent party to ferret out corroborating or contradictory evidence, and having hearings without such preliminary work would result in just a charade.
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What Kavanaugh is accused of is not adolescent drunken high jinks

Some defenders of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court have responded to the allegations that have been leveled against him by arguing, like senator Orrin Hatch does, that this was youthful behavior and that what matters is what kind of person he is now,. But it is important to realize that what is alleged is not drunken high jinks, some casual groping done at a party. What happened was attempted rape that involved isolating, overpowering, and silencing the victim. When Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge are said to have done is take a 15-year old girl Christine Blasey Ford to a closed room and then try to rip off her clothes in order to rape her. It was only her taking a brief opportunity of confusion to lock herself in a bathroom that prevented the rape from taking place. Kavanaugh was 17 years old at the time and in the US many 17-year olds are tried as adults if the crime is serious enough, though whether that is a good thing is a debate for another place and time.
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