Jeff Flake, hypocrite and coward [UPDATED]

[UPDATE: Watch another woman confront Flake and demand an answer that he is unwilling to give.

Whether it was due to this public shaming or not, Flake has now said he wants the FBI to have a week to investigate the charges. But it was only a minor step since he did not vote against sending the nomination to the senate floor without an investigation.. Instead he voted with the other 10 Republicans on the judiciary committee to advance the nomination to the full senate floor, overriding the 10 Democrats on the committee. There the decision on whether to ask for an FBI investigation and, if so, its scope will fall to majority leader Mitch McConnell. He can choose to ignore Flake’s request and unless Flake and one other Republican senator say that they will vote against the nomination if there is no investigation and every single Democrat also say the same thing. There is still some doubt about Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heltkamp of North Dakota.]

As I predicted, for all his fine words and empathetic expressions, retiring Republican senator Jeff Flake is a party hack and always votes the party line and he has done so again, declaring that he will vote in favor of Brett Kavanaugh, despite yesterday’s appalling testimony by the nominee where he displayed an appalling lack of judicial temperament, making wild accusations at all manner of people and groups in an angry tone of voice and almost bursting into tears at times.
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The Brett Kavanaugh senate testimony

I watched the Brett Kavanaugh hearings where he began with a long 45 minute opening statement. The challenge for Kavanaugh was to be more credible than Christine Blasey Ford. He gave a Trump-like political speech, coming out with guns blazing and attacking Democrats as engaging in a political witch hunt, though he did not use the term. His opening statement was very angry. He was red faced and scowling and he choked up at times, almost in tears, and denied everything. He took a leaf out of Clarence Thomas’s hearings and accused all who opposed him of a a vast left-wing, Democratic conspiracy against him that made false accusations to take him down as part of a political agenda. All that was missing was to use the Thomas language of a ‘high-tech lynching’. He seemed almost out of control. If Ford had talked like Kavanaugh, she would have been described as hysterical.
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Christine Blasey Ford senate hearings

I watched the hearings this morning. As the hearings began, Ford looked nervous, vulnerable, and scared and began speaking with a quavering voice. She got a little better with time but throughout she looked credible and, for want of a better word, natural. She was almost in tears when Blumenthal praised her courage in coming forward despite the trauma. I cringed to hear, when asked about what was her most indelible memory of the event, how Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughed during the assault, that they were having fun assaulting her. She said that she had met Kavanaugh many times before the assault so there was no question of her confusing him with someone else. Although I believed her even before the hearings, I can only say that she showed the entire nation what an honest person she is.
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The new lions of Afghanistan

Afghanistan was the sensation in the cricket Asia Cup that is currently underway. Despite being considered a hopeless underdog, they crushed Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in the first round to advance to the second round of four, along with Bangladesh, Pakistan, and heavy favorites India. There they proved they were no mere flash-in-the-pan, all three of their matches ending in nail-biting finishes. Afghanistan provided pretty much all the excitement in the tournament.
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Lions in India

Until a few months ago, I had thought that lions had always existed only in Africa. But it turns out that not only were lions once roaming parts of Asia, there are Asiatic lions in India even today. Apparently there had once been lions all across the land connections between Africa and India, which makes sense once you think about it since there is no reason why they should have limited their territory unless forced to do so by climate or terrain. This explains why lion metaphors can be found in places like Afghanistan where the political and military leader Ahmad Shah Massoud was called ‘the Lion of Panjshir’.
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Short quiz on evolution

The BBC website has a short quiz consisting of seven true-false questions about evolution that seek to challenge many popular misconceptions. Although I am not a biologist, I do write about evolution from time to time so I took the quiz to see how many misconceptions I had. I got six out of the seven questions right.

But what I want to highlight is the seventh question that I got ‘wrong’. I knew that I would get my response to that one marked wrong even as I answered it. Take a look at the quiz and you will see what I mean.