It was a perfect Beer commercial waiting to happen, and who else is better equipped to make such a commercial than Stephen Colbert?
Well, maybe Budweiser. But Colbert made the first attempt and I must say I am impress.
The commercial began with Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when he admitted… over… and over again… that he like beer.
“Yes, we drank beer. My friends and I, the boys and girls. Yes, we drank beer. I liked beer. I still like beer. We drank beer.”
Watch
If I haven’t said it before, hear me now and hear me good. Donald Trump is full of sh..it! He is a national and international disgrace! A joke!
The funniest thing though is he is surrounded by so many people and no one, I repeat, NO ONE tried to save him from this embarrassment.
Watch as the so-called Leader of the Free World boards Air Force 1, toilet paper in tow!
I hope he washed his hands.
This Brett Kavanaugh nomination process is really allowing Americans and the world to see the true color of Republicans.
In a recent encounter between Republican Senator Orin Hatch and women protesters who were demanding their voice against Kavanaugh be heard, the senator, an elected official, laughed in their face, waved them off and told them to “grow up!”
Kavanaugh’s nomination and the multiple sexual allegations and sexual misconduct charges against him have given victims of sexual abuse a new voice to share their stories. But Republicans have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to these victims in their unending support of Kavanaugh.
And this disgusting display from Orin Hatch exemplifies the very low place this nation is in, thanks in part to Donald Trump and his Republican party.
Republicans led by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are moving at break neck speed to get Brett Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court. But it is the words of another Republican and former Supreme Court Judge thats making news today.
Justice John Paul Stevens, a onetime supporter of Brett Kavanaugh, has changed his mind and now says that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed as the next Justice on the Supreme Court. Roberts mentioned Kavanaugh’s disgraceful performance during his confirmation hearings, where he clearly expressed political biases as his reason for disqualifying Brett.
Meanwhile, Republicans have already set a vote on Friday and a final vote on Saturday to put Kavanaugh on the Court.
In an appearance on MSNBC, Professor Eddie Glaude, MSNBC Contributor was visibly upset at the blatant in-your-face crap that Mitch McConnel and the Republicans are force-feeding the American people.
Glaude said that he was “viscerally angry” because Mitch McConnell “sat there and lied!” Glaude was referring to the way Republicans are fast-tracking Kavanaugh’s confirmation, willfully ignoring established standards in his nomination.
McConnell has decided that the American people do not deserve to know the truth about the FBI investigation into Kavanaugh’s sexual abuse accusations.
“[McConnell] is the poster child of a kind of hypocrisy that is simply eroding the very fabric of this country,” Glaude continued. “These people think that we are Boo-Boo the fool. They think Americans are just stupid… We have to do something here, otherwise we are witnessing the twilight of our civilization!”
The Huffington Post is that the report from the FBI’s background investigation into the sexual assault allegations leveled against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will be shown only to members of the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Tuesday.
“We will get an FBI report soon. It will be made available to each senator and only senators will be allowed to look at it. That’s the way these reports are always handled,” McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill, noting that background investigations are typically added to a nominee’s file for senators to access.
Still, there’s an argument to be made that the extraordinary nature of the current situation merits the public at least being able to view the report’s results.
“There’s a growing consensus in the Senate that when the FBI’s investigation is complete, the finding should be released publicly with any personal information redacted,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said.
Just when you start having some hope that Jeff Flake would do the right thing and objectively look at the FBI report before making his decision, he smacks you in the face with the realization that he is a Republican and as such, will do exactly what his party demands – get in line and vote to confirm accused sexual molester, Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
CNN’s Manu Raju confronted Flake today and asked a few pointed questions. One question was to state his thoughts on Trump’s recent mocking of Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christie Blasey Ford. Flake courageously stepped to the plate and called Trump’s statements “appalling.”
But it was Flake’s answer to the question about whether Brett Kavanaugh was totally honest during his sworn testimony that took the wind out of the #Metoo sails. Flake’s answer clearly showed that his mind is already made up and barring any unforeseen circumstance in the FBI report, Flake will vote ‘yes’ on Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
Raju asked, “You said that if there are demonstrable falsehoods and lies, that would be disqualifying. There have been instances where it appears he was not fully forthcoming with the Senate Judiciary Committee about his past and his antics in college. Does that bother you?”
Flake replied, “I don’t know specifically what you are talking about.”
Flake then goes on in a desperate attempt to down-play Kavanaugh’s drinking problem. He settled on this answer:
“The drinking think, I don’t know how to gauge that, I really don’t.”
He continued. “I’ve said all along, you know if anybody lies under oath, that not something we can deal with.” Flake then concluded “exaggerating or diminishing your successes or failures is something a lot of people are used to.”
Kavanaugh just got a pass from Flake. Next stop, The Supreme Court… despite what the FBI report says.
Watch the video below
He is one of a few Senators who holds the Brett Kavanaugh-for-Supreme-Court nomination in his hands. His decision can sink or help Kavanaugh sail through to a seat on the Supreme Court. So when Arizona Senator Jeff Flake talk these days, people tend listen and try to guess which way he will vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination in a few days.
In a recent interview by the National Constitution Center, the Senator spoke about the recent Kavanaugh testimony where Kavanaugh loudly praised himself as a virgin choir boy who did nothing wrong, and one who certainly did not sexually assault Christie Blasey Ford when he was seventeen years old.
“I was very troubled by the tone of the remarks,” Flake says, referring to the obviously partisan way the judge berated the Democrats on the panel for asking about the sexual abuse accusations against him.
“The initial defense that Judge Kavanaugh gave was something… like I told my wife, I hope I wouldn’t sound that indignant if I felt I was unjustly maligned.”
But then it went on, and the interaction with the members was sharp and partisan. And that concerns me. And I tell myself you give a little leeway because of what he’s been through.
On the other hand, we can’t have this on the court. We simply can’t
Watch clip below
You want to know how much of the Kavanaugh-Ford confrontation I watched?
None of it.
Not even a video news summary or story afterward. Sure, I read about it, but I was not going to buy in to a spectacle that was more thermal heat than pinprick of light from a distant star. And I was not going to justify the breathless coverage, titillating details and abject outrage that both sides were peddling in the run-up to Thursday’s hearing.
But as spectacle, it was, well, spectacular.
Here we had a woman who clearly believes she was sexually molested and feared for her safety and virtue, and a man who said that it never ever happened. What are we supposed to take away from this? In short, the only thing we can take from this, that two people disagree about what happened. There were no verifiable facts. There were no corroborating witnesses. There was just emotion.
Perhaps now with an FBI investigation, something approaching evidence might appear. Maybe there are witnesses who will come forward. But if not, what this process has shown us is that we as a country are as divided as ever and are more than willing to take our opinions down to the village square.
But what really bothers me is the assumption that the system is broken and that if this is the way that Supreme Court nominees are going to be treated, then how will we get anyone on the court? And the reason it bothers me is because it puts women like Dr. Ford and Professor Anita Hill in the position of liars who should be quiet because the nominees somehow deserve to win confirmation.
“If only you hadn’t brought your petty trauma to the village square,” we say.
“If only you had learned early on that men can and will act like, what, men? boys? and that you need to be quiet and let them get it out of their systems.”
“If only you had thought about someone other than yourself and your hurt and pain, and put the national interest before your petty concerns.”
“If only you had reported this assault as soon as it happened. Then we would believe you.”
Because we all remember the scores of gymnasts and other female college athletes who went en masse to the police at Michigan State and USC after being repeatedly violated over at least a decade. It didn’t happen and it’s likely not to happen in the future if this is the way we’re going to treat victims of sexual assault.
The remedy to all of this is oh so simple: Nominate people who haven’t tried to sexually assault other people. How about we do that? Did Samuel Alito assault anyone? John Roberts? Neil Gorsuch? No, they did not. You might not want any of them on the court for political reasons, but they seem to be worthy of their appointments. How about the female justices? No problem either.
We also learned quite a bit about Brett Kavanaugh from his defense. Going defensive and angry and obstinate was not the best strategy. But when the template is in the White House, I suppose you give it your best shot.
What we saw, though, was a Judge dispassionately lose his cool at the worst possible moment. I certainly understand his feelings, but what good did it do? It would have been far better for him to simply answer the questions and to tell the Senators who thought they were helping him by being outraged to stop the histrionics. I suppose that when everybody tells you that you were born for the court, you might get testy when it turns out you’re not.
In then end, though, the real travesty about this nomination fight is not necessarily the accusations against Kavanaugh, but the nomination process itself. Like other nominees before him, Brett Kavanaugh dissembled, deflected, obfuscated and made opaque his judicial views and any sense of what kind of justice he might be. Of course, we all know what his judicial philosophy is, but can someone please answer a question?
And the biggest lie is the one he told when he said that certain cases, Roe being the most contentious, represented settled law. This is serious hogwash and Kavanaugh and the Senators and the Congress know this. After all, Roe upended settled law in most states by legalizing a procedure that was illegal, in the same way that Brown overturned segregation, and other settled law decisions such as Lochner, Gobitis (overturned three years later), Korematsu (June), Abood (June) and many others were also summarily overturned. And previous rights that were not specifically enumerated were then found to be constitutional, such as corporate speech in Citizen’s United, personal gun ownership in Heller, and gay marriage rights in Obergefell.
So don’t tell me that any previous case decided by the court is settled and therefore could not be overturned. That’s why you were nominated, Brett; to be the deciding vote to deny people the right to vote, to be treated legally by the police, or to have control over one’s own body.
It took Nixon and Reagan three tries before they found their justices in 1969 and 1987, respectively. Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh is not the best choice for this position and that we need to look elsewhere.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
“The world is laughing at us,” is one of Donald Trump’s favorite dog whistle when he wants to convey the lie that he is the best thing to happen to America since sliced bread! And often, his supporters buy the lie.
But during his America First speech to world leaders at the United Nations yesterday, Trump apparently forgot who his audience was. He forgot he wasn’t talking to base and tried patting himself on the back for a job well done.
“My administration is the best thing to happen to America since sliced bread…,” well, no. Trump didn’t actually say that, but he might as well.
“In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” World leaders from 193 countries, laughed at the American president, and rightly so.
So next time Donald Trump stand in front of his base and proclaim “the world is laughing at us,” we can all agree. We’ve seen it with our own eyes and we have Donald Trump to thank.
All together now, #ThanksTRUMP
And boys, you know, can be clueless about some things, like sexual harassment and thinking that they can do anything to a girl or woman if they feel like doing it. They also sometimes have trouble understanding just how offensive they are by dismissing a woman’s claim that she’s been the victim of any kind of unwanted action.
So here we are again.
Of course, how you see the Kavanagh-Blasey Ford issue depends on what side of the political spectrum you inhabit, and I tend to agree with these sentiments about how careful we all need to be in the absence of a thorough investigation.
And that’s the point. We need the legal authorities to conduct a thorough investigation before we rush to judgement, even though that train left on the hour, and now it’s proverbially ten past. Forcing Dr. Blasey Ford to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee will only create a he said-she said moment that does not serve the interests of justice.
Which leads directly to the next point; that the Republicans on the committee, and in the Senate, have very little interest in the actual, factual, verifiable story. Senator Charles Grassley has already telegraphed (what a quaint saying, no?) his intentions by saying that Dr. Blasey Ford must appear this week, or the committee will go forward with their vote to send Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the whole Senate. Thursday seems to be good for everybody, but that still doesn’t allow for an investigation.
In truth, Grassley’s argument is not one of facts, but one of time. We don’t have time to weigh your arguments, little lady, because if this gets drawn out past the elections and we lose the Senate, then we might never be able to strike down legal protections and precedents regarding your womb, your medicine cabinet, your pantry, your LGBTQ children/relatives/acquaintances, your water, your air, your employer’s right to pay you less, your right to overcome corporate-based arbitration if you get hurt by one of our products, your privacy, your medical care, your education, and your vote.
To rush the process would undermine the justice system and everything Judge Kavanaugh has said during his hearings about weighing evidence and rendering a fair, just verdict. At least that’s what I think he meant behind all of the obfuscation and non-answering. There’s still plenty of time to conduct an investigation, get the facts, listen to the two individuals involved, and come to some kind of conclusion before November’s election.
Or maybe Senator Grassley wants to rush so that the president and other GOP guys can’t continue to say foolish things about why Dr. Blasey Ford didn’t rush to the police at age 15 or come forward earlier. All you have to do is witness the abuse she’s endured in the past week to answer those charges. And if you think it’s just women who fall silent in the face of abuse, then think again. Certainly, more women are sexually abused, but the stigma attached to it affects all people.
Justice delayed is justice denied. But so it justice rushed.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
Every time I think we’ve hit rock bottom, this happens…
On Friday, Splinter broke news that Miller, a former Trump aide stands accused of giving a pregnant stripper who he had been involved with an abortion pill without her knowledge.
According to court filings, Miller “visited her at her apartment with a Smoothie beverage. Unbeknownst to Jane Doe, the Smoothie contained an abortion bill. [sic] The pill induced an abortion, and Jane Doe wound up in a hospital emergency room, bleeding heavily and nearly went into a coma. The unborn child died.”
Miller denied the accusations.
“To be clear, none of this is is in any way true,” he said. “That doesn’t matter however in the current court of public opinion, where fraudulent statements and a lack of factual support rule the day as long as it fits into a tweet.”
