“Conjoined twins. Bearded ladies. Pinheads. Eight-foot men. Human skeletons. Alligator and lobster boys. A mother with four legs.
Few can say they are not irresistibly intrigued by freak shows.
Medical abnormalities, grotesque life forms, the deeds of serial killers – the mind struggles to rationalize these oddities and outrages. For example, how does a calf have two heads? How do we account for Albert Fish, who infamously commented, “I like children. They are tasty”?
Many find the same sick appeal in K-12 theories and methods. These often constitute a Ripley’s Believe It or Not of classroom anomalies, a News of the Weird about public education – for example, college students who don’t know which side won the Civil War.
A professor at Notre Dame sums up our predicament: “We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity[.]”
An education system working on all cylinders to obliterate knowledge? Now, that is totally fascinating. Probably never before in human history have education and amnesia converged.
The decline in general knowledge is well established. Even educated people don’t know basic things. But this ignorance is not the most fascinating perversity. That would be the two-headed logic for not teaching those things in the first place, when kids are eager and their minds are sponges.
K-12 in America has become a quackery factory. Each new formulation has the goal of excusing ignorance and making sure we get plenty more of it. “
“U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told CNBC last week that President Trump’s tariffs wouldn’t hurt American consumers, noting that because the price increase would be “spread over thousands and thousands of products, nobody’s going to actually notice it at the end of the day.”
Needless to say, poor Ross was summarily tarred-and-feathered by “experts.” What doesn’t this kook understand? Tariffs are a tax, and taxes are always bad.
The logic seems straightforward enough: tariffs increase costs and these costs invariably get passed on to consumers. Thus, tariffs won’t punish China—they’ll punish American consumers. We will pay the price for Trump’s ignorant bravado.
But, as always, the “experts” are wrong. Tariffs will not hurt American consumers, they’ll actually make America richer in the long run.
The Brave Little Toaster
The main reason why so many Americans oppose tariffs is that they don’t understand them. They think tariffs are just another sales tax, and assume that imposing a 10 percent tariff on a product will increase that product’s price by 10 percent. That’s not how it works.
Unlike sales taxes, American tariffs are not applied to a product’s retail price, nor are they applied to the wholesale price. In fact, they’re often not even levied on the entire import price. Instead, tariffs are levied on the first sale price—the price paid to foreign vendors by American companies or their middlemen.
This method of calculation reduces the tax burden on American consumers, but preserves the tariff’s punitive effect on foreign producers.
For example, suppose President Trump were to impose a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese toasters.
Black & Decker makes toasters in China. These toasters sell for $60 in American stores. That’s the retail price. Are tariffs imposed on retail prices? No. This means that the price of toasters will not rise by 10 percent—$66 toasters are a media-concocted boogeyman.
So just how much would this hypothetical tariff increase the price of toasters?
American stores buy their toasters from Chinese manufacturers. But because of China’s (intentionally) convoluted regulatory framework, they often buy them via middlemen located in Hong Kong, Singapore, or Taiwan. These middlemen charge somewhere in the neighborhood of $14 per toaster.
And of course these middlemen don’t work for free: they buy the toasters directly from Chinese factories for $7 per toaster. This is the first sale price, and tariffs are calculated on this figure. Thus the tariff charged on a Black & Decker toaster that retails for $60 works out to just 70 cents.
American consumers don’t pay 10 percent more for toasters—they pay just 1.15 percent more. And that’s assuming Black & Decker doesn’t simply source its toasters from one of China’s competitors, in which case consumers may not see any prices increase whatsoever.
This same rule applies to component pieces, meaning that toasters assembled elsewhere using Chinese parts would only increase in price relative to their proportion of Chinese origin. For example, if a Taiwanese factory assembles $7 toasters using foreign parts, half of which are from China, then tariffs would apply only to half of the value. The final retail price of this hypothetical Taiwanese toaster would increase by just over one-half of 1 percent
Americans consumers may not notice the tariffs, but Chinese producers will. After all, the only reason Americans manufacture in China is because they’re cheap. If Trump’s tariffs change this fact then American companies will do business elsewhere—ideally in America. China is vulnerable and Trump knows it.
In this way tariffs give America leverage over China—leverage we can use to achieve important goals. For example, China steals up to $600 billion in American intellectual property every year. Tariffs could coerce the Chinese into enforcing American IP law (which they pledged to do when they joined the World Trade Organization), thereby generating astronomical amounts of cash and upholding the rule of law.”
I hope the author of 7:50 at least knows the names of the bearded ladies and the 8 foot men. He would fail any course in economics. There is a price to be paid for ignorance and Americans will soon be paying it.
“Senators prepared to view the FBI’s completed report on Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, which the Judiciary Committee announced it had received early Thursday morning, setting up another day of high drama on Capitol Hill.
The White House said overnight that it is “fully confident” that the Senate will confirm President Donald Trump’s nominee, whose confirmation process has been roiled by the allegations of sexual misconduct by three women while he was in high school and college.
In anticipation of the report’s arrival, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Wednesday night teed up a key vote to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination for Friday. Until that vote, senators will be rushing in and out of a secure facility at the Capitol to review the sensitive FBI report that the bureau has compiled, looking into allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh.
In early morning tweets, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, said that he and the committee’s top Democrat had “agreed to alternating EQUAL access for senators to study content from additional background info gathered by non-partisan FBI agents.”
Raj Shah, deputy White House press secretary, said the report, which Democrats have denounced as hasty and incomplete, marked “the last addition to the most comprehensive review of a Supreme Court nominee in history, which includes extensive hearings, multiple committee interviews, over 1,200 questions for the record and over a half million pages of documents.”
In three tweets, the first published at 2:24 a.m. Thursday, Shah said lawmakers will have had “ample time” to review the results of the latest probe by the time they vote on Friday.
The FBI’s report will be available at a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, in the Capitol Visitor Center, a secure room designed for senators to review sensitive or classified material, two Senate officials said. Just one physical copy of the report will be available, and only to senators and 10 committee staffers cleared to view the material.
The two parties will take turns having access to the FBI report in shifts, according to a senior Senate official. For example, Republicans will spend an hour with the report from 8 a.m. until 9 a.m. Thursday, then Democrats will have an hour with the report. It will rotate throughout the rest of the day Thursday and potentially into Friday, with staff members simultaneously briefing senators.
But even before the report was formally sent to the Senate, lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford – the first woman to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual assault – criticized what they viewed as an incomplete FBI probe.
“An FBI supplemental background investigation that did not include an interview of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford – nor the witnesses who corroborate her testimony – cannot be called an investigation,” her legal team said in a statement. “We are profoundly disappointed that after the tremendous sacrifice she made in coming forward, those directing the FBI investigation were not interested in seeking the truth.”
The reopened FBI investigation was prompted by reservations expressed by Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., about moving forward on a full Senate vote without further examination of the accusations of Ford and other “credible” accusers.”
“U.S. Capitol Police arrested Wednesday a former Democratic staffer suspected of posting the personal information of at least one United States senator to the internet.
The home addresses and other personal information of Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch of Utah were posted to Wikipedia on Sept. 27 from an individual located in the House of Representatives.
Jackson A. Cosko, 27, was charged with making public restricted personal information, witness tampering, threats in interstate communications, unauthorized access of a government computer, identity theft, second-degree burglary and unlawful entry, according to a Capitol Police statement. Additional charges may be forthcoming as the investigation continues.
Cosko has most recently worked as an intern for Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. He has also worked under Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and former California Sen. Barbara Boxer, according to Fox News.
Jackson Lee’s Chief of Staff Glenn Rushing told Politico that Cosko has been fired.
“We’re just cooperating with law enforcement right now,” Rushing said.
Cosko is a “Democratic Political Professional & Cybersecurity Graduate Student,” according to his LinkedIn page, which states that his job duties in the U.S. Senate included assisting senior staff “with issues before the Commerce Committee including technology, telecommunications, transportation; as well as with cybersecurity matters before the Homeland Security Committee.””
“What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity[.]”
They may not now who won the war, but that doesn’t prevent them from destroying the statues.
Some in Texas are trying to rename “Austin”. Good luck.
I wonder why they haven’t tried to rename Lee Highway in Northern Virginia.
I do agree with this. The Kavanaugh ordeal has driven some conservative NeverTrumpers back into the Republican ranks. However, it has also made 95% of the public mad and the losers are going to be the maddest come November.
There's a good chance that if Kavanaugh is confirmed, it will do more to boost Democratic turnout, and that if Kavanaugh is voted down or withdrawn, it will do more to boost Republican turnout.
“While the nation’s media are consumed with Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, intrepid heroes Reps. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, of the House leaders of the House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees were grilling the former top lawyer of the FBI, James Baker, behind closed doors. Baker, recall, was the right hand man of James Comey, and was closely involved in the FISA warrants that authorized electronic surveillance of the Trump campaign and presidency. Baker has since left the FBI. Some speculate that he cooperating, but he notably came to the hearing with a bevy of lawyers representing him and the FBI.
Catherin Herridge of Fox News was able to elicit some comment on the testimony from Reps. Meadows and Jordan, though it remains confidential for now:
“During the time that the FBI was putting — that DOJ and FBI were putting together the FISA (surveillance warrant) during the time prior to the election — there was another source giving information directly to the FBI, which we found the source to be pretty explosive,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
Meadows and Jordan would not elaborate on the source, or answer questions about whether the source was a reporter. They did stress that the source who provided information to the FBI’s Russia case was not previously known to congressional investigators.
Baker is at the heart of surveillance abuse allegations, and his deposition lays the groundwork for next week’s planned closed-door interview with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Baker, as the FBI’s top lawyer, helped secure the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on Page, as well as three subsequent renewals. Prior to the deposition, Republican investigators said they believed Baker could explain why information about the British ex-spy behind a salacious Trump-related dossier, Christopher Steele, and Steele’s apparent bias against then-candidate Trump, were withheld from the FISA court, and whether other exculpatory information was known to Rosenstein when he signed the final FISA renewal for Page in June 2017.
Fox News asked Baker after the deposition about the handling of the Trump dossier, what he told Rosenstein about exculpatory evidence, and whether he is the subject of an FBI leak investigation. Baker told Fox News he could not answer such questions.
John Solomon of The Hill, another ace reporter with good sources, has identified what may be the “explosive” source:
Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign.
Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm.
That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firmFusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump and Moscow were colluding to hijack the presidential election.
The dossier, though mostly unverified, was then used by the FBI as the main evidence seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in the final days of the campaign.
The revelation was confirmed both in contemporaneous evidence and testimony secured by a joint investigation by Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight committees, my source tells me.
It means the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.”
——————–
“The long descent of Arizona Republicans from Barry Goldwater to Jeff Flake is in many ways the story of the decline of the modern conservative movement.
As Tucker Carlson noted after watching Flake’s sad capitulation to Democrats’ preposterous demands for an FBI investigation of Brett Kavanaugh: “In Washington, when they congratulate you on leaving the partisan circus, chances are you are now the ringmaster of the partisan circus.”
But Flake’s failure is not just an individual one. It is representative of the failure of large portions of the conservative movement to adapt to the reality of Democrats’ no-holds barred tactics. Those tactics are not new, of course. The GOP’s insistence on having mild-mannered gentlemen as its standard bearers, however, has allowed the Democrats to hide their fundamental substantive and tactical radicalism in plain sight.
Mitt Romney and the Bushes (both senior and junior) were sincere old-school patricians who acted according to a moral code the Democrats had long since discarded. John McCain had a bit of street-fighter in him, but he used it only to fight conservatives and win the plaudits of liberals. One would have to go back to Ronald Reagan to find a GOP leader who challenged the power of liberalism without apology.
And then along came Donald Trump, who, whatever his personal and political deviations from the tenets of “movement conservatism,” at least recognized who his enemies were. If they punched him, he would punch back twice as hard. After decades of watching gentlemen absorb punches and give up the fight, this was why so many GOP voters supported him. Unfortunately, he inherited a party apparatus that largely insisted in playing by the old Democrat-fixed rules—which meant being the hapless Washington Generals to the Democrats Harlem Globetrotters.”
——————–
“Any Republican with just the tiniest amount of common sense would understand the Democrats’ obstruction strategy and the dangers of giving in to it. Even establishment squishes like Chuck Grassley and John Cornyn (who said, “I can’t think of a more embarrassing scandal for the United States Senate since the McCarthy hearings,”) and, most stunningly, Lindsey Graham, long a bane of conservatives, got it. Graham stunningly rose to the occasion with a four-minute evisceration of the Democrats unethical tactics.
“To my Republican colleagues,” Graham said, staring at Flake, “if you vote no, you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.” If that kind of statement from “Mr. Bipartisan” Graham couldn’t knock sense into Flake (and Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who have gotten a pass from conservatives here they don’t deserve) then they are long past saving.
Because of Flake’s cowardice, all future GOP officials taking controversial votes are at risk of becoming victims of the Left’s continual campaign of mob intimidation, harassment, and violence. Flake has shown the Democrats that mobocracy works. Shooting Republicans, beating up Republicans in the street, screaming at Republicans in elevators, chasing Republicans from restaurants. All of these have become “normalized,” to use the Left’s favorite term, in the wake of Trump’s election. There is nothing bipartisan or courageous about giving into the mob, abandoning your party, and soaking in the plaudits of the pundits along the way.
Sadly, Flake—who once headed the libertarian Goldwater Institute and had a strongly conservative voting record in the House before moving left as a Senator—has shown just how badly the thing people are pleased to call the “conservative movement” has failed to adapt to the reality that they face a totalitarian enemy in what passes as modern liberalism.
This wing of movement conservatives, dominated by NeverTrumpers such as Flake, has chosen to retreat into the comfortable womb of treating conservatism as a philosophical abstraction rather than dealing the messy realities of actual politics in which the options are often imperfect. The decline of Jeff Flake shows that NeverTrump corrupts and absolute NeverTrump corrupts absolutely.”
Of course if Kavanaugh is confirmed after the FBI essentially exonerates him, Flake will have been proven right and both Kavanaugh and the Republicans will be in better shape than if they had tried to ram through the vote last week. Will The Cult then apologize to Flake? Only if instructed to do so by Dear Leader.
Of course the FBI won’t “exonerate” Kavanaugh no matter what and how much evidence it obtains. Today’s Trump-hate mania tells us the reason of the hour (until this afternoon, when it will be a totally opposite reason)…
Unfortunately it looks like Rod Rosenstein and Chris Wray, both of whom worked closely with Brett Kavanaugh in past GOP roles, may have been more eager to please Trump and McConnell than to get as close to the truth as possible. Too many leads left unfollowed. Sad.
Did the bad man with the economics background hurt your feelings?
The author is Spencer P. Morrison, a writer and author of Bobbins, Not Gold. He is the editor-in-chief of the National Economics Editorial. He knows of what he speaks.
Perhaps you need a refresher. It has been awhile since you went to college, maybe things have changed since the old days. Or maybe you’re already paying the price for the ignorance you mentioned. 🙂
——————————
And just curious Kim, what is it you “liked” about Ricky’s comment?
He’ll still be a spineless amoeba who delayed things and put Kavanaugh and his family thru an unnecessary ordeal to score political points. He’ll still be a traitor.
” The chairman of the Senate Judiciary says the FBI found “no hint of misconduct” in its background investigation of sexual misconduct claims against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Sen. Chuck Grassley says he’s received a briefing from staff on the confidential report. And the Iowa Republican says in a statement that “there’s nothing in it that we didn’t already know.”
He says the FBI couldn’t find any people who could “attest to any of the allegations” against Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh denies the allegations.
The FBI report was given to the Senate overnight. Senators are reading it Thursday in a secure room in the Capitol complex, but aren’t expected to discuss specific details of what they learn.
Grassley said it’s time to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination. The senator calls the federal judge one of “most qualified nominees to ever come before the Senate.””
“Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley read the FBI supplemental report on Brett Kavanaugh and declared, “There’s nothing in it that we didn’t already know.”
The senator was briefed on the report at 8 a.m. Thursday and released a statement soon after promising a vote for Kavanaugh.
“It’s time to vote. I’ll be voting to confirm Judge Kavanaugh,” he said.
Grassley also said, “I trust that career agents of the FBI have done their work independent of political or partisan considerations. That’s exactly what senators from both sides asked for. Now it’s up to senators to fulfill their Constitutional duty and make a judgement.””
There is a price to be paid for ignorance and Americans will soon be paying it.
There’s an aspect of crying wolf in your posts when literally all of America’s ills have Donald Trump as their source and cause. I mean, in what world is it the case that people who *hate* Trump didn’t also give us the education system we now have?
“POLL: Mid-Kavanaugh Confirmation Circus, Democrat Enthusiasm Gap Tanks
“Turns out, launching a massive character assassination campaign for purely political purposes has consequences. Who knew?
According to NPR, Democrat enthusiasm has tanked since July when an NPR/PBS/Maris Poll showed Democrats surging ahead with a 10 point lead in voter enthusiasm.
That lead is now 2 points, or as NPR writes, “a statistical tie.”
NPR has more:
Democrats’ advantage on which party’s candidate they are more likely to support has also been cut in half since last month. Democrats still retain a 6-point edge on that question, but it was 12 points after a Marist poll conducted in mid-September.
The results come amid the pitched and hotly partisan confirmation battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Multiple women have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct when he was in high school and college. He categorically denies all the allegations. The FBI is conducting a supplemental investigation into the accusations that is expected to be wrapped up by the end of this week.
With Democrats already up fired up for this election, the Kavanaugh confirmation fight has apparently had the effect of rousing a dormant GOP base.
“The result of hearings, at least in the short run, is the Republican base was awakened,” noted Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll.
While Democrats and Republicans are now equally enthusiastic about the midterms, the story is very different for key Democratic base groups and independents. While 82 percent of Democrats say the midterms are very important, that’s true of just 60 percent of people under 30, 61 percent of Latinos and 65 percent of independents.
Democrats need to net 23 seats to take back control of the House, but if those groups stay home in large numbers, it would blunt potential Democratic gains. With 34 days to go until Election Day, it all points to another election dominated by party activists.”
“Republican candidates in key Senate races are closing in on or beating their Democratic opponents following Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday.
Tennessee
A new Fox News poll shows that support among Tennessee voters for Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn is ahead of support for her Democratic opponent Phil Bredesen by five points, at 48-43 percent. Her lead in the polls for the soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat has jumped by two points since last month.”
——————–
The same thing happened in North Dakota, Arizona, and Missouri as well. 🙂
“Conservative Women Will Make Democrats Pay For Kavanaugh In November
Democrats assumed Republican women would play into their identity politics instead of seeking truth, and that assumption is blowing up in their faces.”
——————–
“Since the day Brett Kavanaugh was named as President Trump’s nominee to serve on The Supreme Court, women on the left have been angry. Now women on the right are even angrier. The media circus surrounding the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh have produced no evidence that he is, or ever was, the man that Democrats and the media have portrayed him to be. Many conservative women see an eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee standing his ground, while duly elected members of the Senate attempt to destroy his life and prevent him from serving on the nation’s highest court. These women are furious about the behavior of the left, and they don’t intend to stand for it.
With Senate races tightening all over the country as Election Day approaches, Republican women have shown tremendous fortification through the Kavanaugh hearings and allegations. In The Marist Poll released Wednesday, 83 percent of Republican women claim that the midterm elections are “very important,” a 12 percent increase from the same poll conducted in July. The treatment of Kavanaugh has lit a fire in the belly of conservative women. Enthusiasm among Democratic women actually fell two points — from 81 percent to 79 percent — over the same period.”
———————
“Emma Green of The Atlantic spoke to some very angry conservative women, who assured her there would be hell to pay in November. These women feel energized to stand up for what is right, to defend the integrity of a man and his family dragged through hell in the name of political gain, and to do whatever they can to prevent something similar happening in the future.
Democrats overplayed their hand with women in this country. They made a dangerous assumption that a man accused of sexual assault could not be exonerated to the public, and that all women would certainly take the side of the female accuser. They assumed Republican women would play into their identity politics instead of seeking truth, and that assumption is blowing up in their faces. Women who may have been feeling disillusioned by President Trump have found a new motivation to vote against Democrats in the Midterms.”
“Conservative Women Are Angry About Kavanaugh—And They Think Other Voters Are, Too
Local- and state-level leaders across the country say they’re ready to lash out against Democrats in the midterm elections.”
When many conservative women around the country watched Christine Blasey Ford appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, they didn’t find her testimony compelling or convincing, as many liberals did.
They saw a political farce.
“Honestly, I don’t think I have ever been so angry in all of my adult life,” says Ginger Howard, a Republican national committeewoman from Georgia. “It brings me to the point of tears, it makes me so angry.”
In interviews with roughly a dozen female conservative leaders from as many states, this was the overwhelming sentiment: These women are infuriated with the way the sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have been handled. They are not convinced by Ford or any other woman who has come forward. They resent the implication that all women should support the accusers. And they believe that this scandal will ultimately hurt the cause of women who have been sexually assaulted.
Above all, these women, and the women they know, are ready to lash out against Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.
Nearly all the women I spoke with are plugged into state- and local-level conservative politics. Their collective, overwhelming sense is that, like Howard, women voters are angry about what’s happening to Kavanaugh. “I’ve got women in my church who were not politically active at all who were incensed with this,” says Melody Potter, the chairwoman of the West Virginia Republican Party—the first woman to hold that position, she made sure to point out. In her state, the stakes of the Kavanaugh scandal are immense: Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is fighting for his seat in a place where more than two-thirds of voters supported Donald Trump in 2016. With voters “energized” to elect people “who are going to support President Trump,” Potter says, West Virginians are closely watching how Manchin acts on Kavanaugh—especially now that the situation has become so politicized.
Organizers in other states say they’ve been hearing the same thing. “People in Indiana are angry. They are mad. They are changing their mind,” says Jodi Smith, the Indianapolis-based state director for the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List. When Senator Joe Donnelly, another vulnerable Democrat who is up for reelection in November, declared late last week that he would vote against Kavanaugh, it “started a firestorm of epic proportions,” Smith says. From her perspective on the ground in a highly contested swing state, “this is one of the best things that could happen to us.”
It’s not yet clear whether the Kavanaugh affair will work to the GOP’s advantage; recent polling has not conclusively shown what women, for example, think about these allegations. “If the Republicans don’t get it together and make sure that he gets in there, that’s not going to help us,” says Howard, the Georgia RNC official. “What makes me mad at times about our party is we don’t stand up enough and say, ‘Enough of your shenanigans! We’re not putting up with this!’” And with the full Senate vote delayed and a supplemental FBI investigation under way, it’s not certain that Kavanaugh’s nomination will ultimately be successful.”
———————
Yeah Flake and Never-Trumpers, she’s referring to you. 🙂
But in their defense it is very hard to stand up when you have no spine.
WASHINGTON – Legendary news anchor Ted Koppel said the Democratic Party is treating Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers differently than they treated former President Clinton’s accusers.
Juanita Brodderick, who came forward in the 1990s and accused Clinton of rape, recently said Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) ignored her deposition to independent counsel Ken Starr.
Feinstein and other Democrats currently serving on the Judiciary Committee, such as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), ultimately voted against Clinton’s impeachment.
PJM asked Koppel, who extensively covered Clinton’s impeachment as the anchor of ABC’s Nightline, about Brodderick’s recent statements.
“It’s true. I think it’s a very legitimate point. What do I think? It depends on whose ox is gored, right? It all depends on where you’re coming from on the political spectrum,” Koppel said after appearing on the Kalb Report for a discussion about “journalism in the age of Trump” at the National Press Club on Monday evening. …
______________________________________________
… Koppel said Trump “has been wonderful” for cable news ratings.
“Your boss acknowledged as much months ago during the campaign,” he told Brian Stelter, host of Reliable Sources on CNN, referencing Jeff Zucker. …
… Koppel said CNN and MSNBC focus on Trump and related news almost all day and they are missing other important stories.
“Is there a moment of the day when they are not focusing on Donald Trump or some intimately related subject? It is, essentially, all I know, every once in a while. You know, if the number of people who died in Indonesia gets up to 1,000 they will give it a mention or two.” …
___________________________________
@8:02 and @7:50 refer to a specific type of ignorance: economic illiteracy. No president in the last 80 years other than Trump has been so stupid as to start trade wars with most of our major trading partners.
The FBI Report need not exonerate Kavanaugh to the satisfaction of any Democrats. It only needs to produce the votes of Flake and either Collins or Murkowski.
SolarP, 2:05 is your “Kim and I fell in love” moment. Even Ann Coulter has said that Trump is profoundly ignorant and lazy, and she was and is one of his biggest promoters.
Meh. I already know Trump’s an intellectual child, Ricky. And I recognize some silly tweet isn’t as deranged as wanting to allow half-born babies to be murdered. You’re a weird one.
Pretty good press conference going on with these GOP committee members right now. Articulating good stuff on hearing details as well as big picture stuff.
A Navy vet has been arrested for sending ricin envelopes to the president and others. I notice he’s smiling for the mug shot after confessing. The smiling will stop when he arrives in federal prison.
“A Utah Navy veteran confessed to sending four envelopes containing the substance from which ricin is derived to President Donald Trump and members of his administration, authorities said in court documents.
William Clyde Allen III, 39, made the confession while speaking with investigators after his arrest at his house in the small city of Logan, north of Salt Lake City, according to documents filed Wednesday night in a Utah court. He told them he had purchased castor beans and sent the letters that had the beans in them.
The documents filed to justify Allen’s arrest did not state a motive. He was being held on a $25,000 cash-only bond.
State investigators working with the FBI said the envelopes with ground castor beans were mailed last week to the president, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the Navy’s top officer, Adm. John Richardson.
Authorities have said the letters were intercepted and no one was injured. Castor beans can cause injury if swallowed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says
Investigators say all four letters tested positive for ricin.”
SP, I would agree that no presidents are perfect and each has areas where he lacks knowledge. However, I think that most people would agree that no “intellectual child” has been President before. Trump’s cabinet and other aides were stunned to find out he was an “intellectual child”. That is why they called him an idiot, a moron, a dope, an eleven year old and a fifth grader. That hasn’t happened before. That level of stupidity is unlike anything that has happened before in this country.
OK, Ricky. If that’s where your placing the goalposts for now, based on a few folks’ assertions, I’ll give you the extra point, for whatever say-nothing that is. But I’ll still believe that half-born baby killing thing is an intellectual shortcoming in some sense or other. Maybe just noetic. But I don’t know why the distinction matters.
“Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), another potential swing vote in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, strongly signaled a “Yes” vote on Wednesday when he announced his reviewing process.
According to Manchin, he will base his vote on Kavanaugh’s life from age 22-53, not his life in high school, which Democrats have increasingly scrutinized in the past weeks amid allegations from Christine Blasey Ford that the SCOTUS nominee sexually assaulted her at a pool party 36 years ago.
“I am looking at the gentleman as an adult from 22 to 53, thirty-one years of professional service,” Manchin told Al-Jazeera. “I am looking at him as a father. As a person in a community, how he interacts with his community. I am trying to put the human side to it.”
Should Manchin vote “No” on Kavanaugh, he will severely anger his West Virginia constituents, who favor his confirmation to the Supreme Court by an overwhelming majority — a healthy 58%.
A “No” vote from Manchin would also contradict previous statements made by the senator, who said he would not allow Ford’s allegations to exclude Kavanaugh from the nomination process so long as they remained unsubstantiated and uncorroborated.”
NEW: Asked by ABC News' @caphilltrish if he is leaning on voting "yes" on Brett Kavanaugh, Sen. Jeff Flake says, "Can't say anything but you can say that I was a 'yes' before this … thus far, we’ve seen no new, credible corroboration" https://t.co/0BPmB2PaCqpic.twitter.com/d75eBPSqoW
“Senate Judiciary Committee Statement Suggests Ford’s Legal Team Could Be In Trouble
“The ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct require a lawyer to consult with his or her client about the means to be used to accomplish the client’s objectives …”
————————
“The committee suggests that Ford’s lawyers have some major questions to answer regarding their apparent attempt to block their own client from knowing about the offer, which would be a clear violation of the ABA code of professional conduct.
“Clearly, Dr. Ford’s attorneys did not tell her that we could protect her privacy and speak to her in California,” the committee concludes. “The ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct require a lawyer to consult with his or her client about the means to be used to accomplish the client’s objectives—including informing the client of settlement offers. It is deeply unfortunate that Dr. Ford’s Democratic-activist lawyers appear to have used Dr. Ford in order to advance their own political agenda. A lot of pain and hardship could have been avoided had Dr. Ford’s attorneys informed her of the committee’s offer to meet her in California to receive her testimony.”
————————
A. It now looks like with the FBI “exoneration” Kavanaugh will be confirmed. We will never know if he would have been confirmed last Friday without the brief FBI investigation proposed by Flake. The Cult may call him an “amoeba”, but Flake got Coons to sign off on the one week length of the FBI review, so the Dems can’t credibly argue for another extension. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, he should (and probably will) send a Thank you note to Flake. The Cult can then look for a new “traitor” to attack.
B. Speaking of which, we learned at 11:28 that you don’t have to post something rational to be suspected of “treason”. If you “like” a rational conservative post, you may be targeted by Trump Cult Inquisitors. The NeverTrump coalition hereby announces that anyone can “like” any post they desire without being accused of being a Trumpkin. However, if you actually post a defense of Trump “falling in love” with Kim (North Korean not ours), you are fair game.
Wandering Views 
“K-12: Horrifying yet Fascinating”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/10/k12_horrifying_yet_fascinating.html
“Conjoined twins. Bearded ladies. Pinheads. Eight-foot men. Human skeletons. Alligator and lobster boys. A mother with four legs.
Few can say they are not irresistibly intrigued by freak shows.
Medical abnormalities, grotesque life forms, the deeds of serial killers – the mind struggles to rationalize these oddities and outrages. For example, how does a calf have two heads? How do we account for Albert Fish, who infamously commented, “I like children. They are tasty”?
Many find the same sick appeal in K-12 theories and methods. These often constitute a Ripley’s Believe It or Not of classroom anomalies, a News of the Weird about public education – for example, college students who don’t know which side won the Civil War.
A professor at Notre Dame sums up our predicament: “We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity[.]”
An education system working on all cylinders to obliterate knowledge? Now, that is totally fascinating. Probably never before in human history have education and amnesia converged.
The decline in general knowledge is well established. Even educated people don’t know basic things. But this ignorance is not the most fascinating perversity. That would be the two-headed logic for not teaching those things in the first place, when kids are eager and their minds are sponges.
K-12 in America has become a quackery factory. Each new formulation has the goal of excusing ignorance and making sure we get plenty more of it. “
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Huh.
“U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told CNBC last week that President Trump’s tariffs wouldn’t hurt American consumers, noting that because the price increase would be “spread over thousands and thousands of products, nobody’s going to actually notice it at the end of the day.”
Needless to say, poor Ross was summarily tarred-and-feathered by “experts.” What doesn’t this kook understand? Tariffs are a tax, and taxes are always bad.
The logic seems straightforward enough: tariffs increase costs and these costs invariably get passed on to consumers. Thus, tariffs won’t punish China—they’ll punish American consumers. We will pay the price for Trump’s ignorant bravado.
But, as always, the “experts” are wrong. Tariffs will not hurt American consumers, they’ll actually make America richer in the long run.
The Brave Little Toaster
The main reason why so many Americans oppose tariffs is that they don’t understand them. They think tariffs are just another sales tax, and assume that imposing a 10 percent tariff on a product will increase that product’s price by 10 percent. That’s not how it works.
Unlike sales taxes, American tariffs are not applied to a product’s retail price, nor are they applied to the wholesale price. In fact, they’re often not even levied on the entire import price. Instead, tariffs are levied on the first sale price—the price paid to foreign vendors by American companies or their middlemen.
This method of calculation reduces the tax burden on American consumers, but preserves the tariff’s punitive effect on foreign producers.
For example, suppose President Trump were to impose a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese toasters.
Black & Decker makes toasters in China. These toasters sell for $60 in American stores. That’s the retail price. Are tariffs imposed on retail prices? No. This means that the price of toasters will not rise by 10 percent—$66 toasters are a media-concocted boogeyman.
So just how much would this hypothetical tariff increase the price of toasters?
American stores buy their toasters from Chinese manufacturers. But because of China’s (intentionally) convoluted regulatory framework, they often buy them via middlemen located in Hong Kong, Singapore, or Taiwan. These middlemen charge somewhere in the neighborhood of $14 per toaster.
And of course these middlemen don’t work for free: they buy the toasters directly from Chinese factories for $7 per toaster. This is the first sale price, and tariffs are calculated on this figure. Thus the tariff charged on a Black & Decker toaster that retails for $60 works out to just 70 cents.
American consumers don’t pay 10 percent more for toasters—they pay just 1.15 percent more. And that’s assuming Black & Decker doesn’t simply source its toasters from one of China’s competitors, in which case consumers may not see any prices increase whatsoever.
This same rule applies to component pieces, meaning that toasters assembled elsewhere using Chinese parts would only increase in price relative to their proportion of Chinese origin. For example, if a Taiwanese factory assembles $7 toasters using foreign parts, half of which are from China, then tariffs would apply only to half of the value. The final retail price of this hypothetical Taiwanese toaster would increase by just over one-half of 1 percent
Americans consumers may not notice the tariffs, but Chinese producers will. After all, the only reason Americans manufacture in China is because they’re cheap. If Trump’s tariffs change this fact then American companies will do business elsewhere—ideally in America. China is vulnerable and Trump knows it.
In this way tariffs give America leverage over China—leverage we can use to achieve important goals. For example, China steals up to $600 billion in American intellectual property every year. Tariffs could coerce the Chinese into enforcing American IP law (which they pledged to do when they joined the World Trade Organization), thereby generating astronomical amounts of cash and upholding the rule of law.”
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7:50 proves that 7:43 is accurate.
I hope the author of 7:50 at least knows the names of the bearded ladies and the 8 foot men. He would fail any course in economics. There is a price to be paid for ignorance and Americans will soon be paying it.
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Let the leaking begin!
And then confirm the man.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/nationworld/senate-receives-fbi-report-on-kavanaugh-allegations-20181004/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
“Senators prepared to view the FBI’s completed report on Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, which the Judiciary Committee announced it had received early Thursday morning, setting up another day of high drama on Capitol Hill.
The White House said overnight that it is “fully confident” that the Senate will confirm President Donald Trump’s nominee, whose confirmation process has been roiled by the allegations of sexual misconduct by three women while he was in high school and college.
In anticipation of the report’s arrival, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Wednesday night teed up a key vote to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination for Friday. Until that vote, senators will be rushing in and out of a secure facility at the Capitol to review the sensitive FBI report that the bureau has compiled, looking into allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh.
In early morning tweets, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, said that he and the committee’s top Democrat had “agreed to alternating EQUAL access for senators to study content from additional background info gathered by non-partisan FBI agents.”
Raj Shah, deputy White House press secretary, said the report, which Democrats have denounced as hasty and incomplete, marked “the last addition to the most comprehensive review of a Supreme Court nominee in history, which includes extensive hearings, multiple committee interviews, over 1,200 questions for the record and over a half million pages of documents.”
In three tweets, the first published at 2:24 a.m. Thursday, Shah said lawmakers will have had “ample time” to review the results of the latest probe by the time they vote on Friday.
The FBI’s report will be available at a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, in the Capitol Visitor Center, a secure room designed for senators to review sensitive or classified material, two Senate officials said. Just one physical copy of the report will be available, and only to senators and 10 committee staffers cleared to view the material.
The two parties will take turns having access to the FBI report in shifts, according to a senior Senate official. For example, Republicans will spend an hour with the report from 8 a.m. until 9 a.m. Thursday, then Democrats will have an hour with the report. It will rotate throughout the rest of the day Thursday and potentially into Friday, with staff members simultaneously briefing senators.
But even before the report was formally sent to the Senate, lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford – the first woman to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual assault – criticized what they viewed as an incomplete FBI probe.
“An FBI supplemental background investigation that did not include an interview of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford – nor the witnesses who corroborate her testimony – cannot be called an investigation,” her legal team said in a statement. “We are profoundly disappointed that after the tremendous sacrifice she made in coming forward, those directing the FBI investigation were not interested in seeking the truth.”
The reopened FBI investigation was prompted by reservations expressed by Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., about moving forward on a full Senate vote without further examination of the accusations of Ford and other “credible” accusers.”
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And oh look, it was a Democrat staffer who doxed the R’s last week. But of course the Rep and Senators he worked for deny any knowledge of it.
And he’s been arrested. 🙂
http://dailycaller.com/2018/10/03/capitol-police-arrest-ex-democratic-staffer-suspected-of-doxxing-senators/
“U.S. Capitol Police arrested Wednesday a former Democratic staffer suspected of posting the personal information of at least one United States senator to the internet.
The home addresses and other personal information of Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch of Utah were posted to Wikipedia on Sept. 27 from an individual located in the House of Representatives.
Jackson A. Cosko, 27, was charged with making public restricted personal information, witness tampering, threats in interstate communications, unauthorized access of a government computer, identity theft, second-degree burglary and unlawful entry, according to a Capitol Police statement. Additional charges may be forthcoming as the investigation continues.
Cosko has most recently worked as an intern for Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. He has also worked under Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and former California Sen. Barbara Boxer, according to Fox News.
Jackson Lee’s Chief of Staff Glenn Rushing told Politico that Cosko has been fired.
“We’re just cooperating with law enforcement right now,” Rushing said.
Cosko is a “Democratic Political Professional & Cybersecurity Graduate Student,” according to his LinkedIn page, which states that his job duties in the U.S. Senate included assisting senior staff “with issues before the Commerce Committee including technology, telecommunications, transportation; as well as with cybersecurity matters before the Homeland Security Committee.””
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“What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity[.]”
They may not now who won the war, but that doesn’t prevent them from destroying the statues.
Some in Texas are trying to rename “Austin”. Good luck.
I wonder why they haven’t tried to rename Lee Highway in Northern Virginia.
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Just as I thought. This Kavanaugh stuff is helping Debra:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-kavanaugh-helping-republicans-midterm-chances/
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I do agree with this. The Kavanaugh ordeal has driven some conservative NeverTrumpers back into the Republican ranks. However, it has also made 95% of the public mad and the losers are going to be the maddest come November.
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And in other news……
The Russia, Russia, Russia fraud has been further exposed.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/closed_door_testimony_yesterday_revealed_explosive_additional_source_used_for_fisa_warrant_to_spy_on_trump_campaign.html
“While the nation’s media are consumed with Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, intrepid heroes Reps. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, of the House leaders of the House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees were grilling the former top lawyer of the FBI, James Baker, behind closed doors. Baker, recall, was the right hand man of James Comey, and was closely involved in the FISA warrants that authorized electronic surveillance of the Trump campaign and presidency. Baker has since left the FBI. Some speculate that he cooperating, but he notably came to the hearing with a bevy of lawyers representing him and the FBI.
Catherin Herridge of Fox News was able to elicit some comment on the testimony from Reps. Meadows and Jordan, though it remains confidential for now:
“During the time that the FBI was putting — that DOJ and FBI were putting together the FISA (surveillance warrant) during the time prior to the election — there was another source giving information directly to the FBI, which we found the source to be pretty explosive,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
Meadows and Jordan would not elaborate on the source, or answer questions about whether the source was a reporter. They did stress that the source who provided information to the FBI’s Russia case was not previously known to congressional investigators.
Baker is at the heart of surveillance abuse allegations, and his deposition lays the groundwork for next week’s planned closed-door interview with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Baker, as the FBI’s top lawyer, helped secure the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on Page, as well as three subsequent renewals. Prior to the deposition, Republican investigators said they believed Baker could explain why information about the British ex-spy behind a salacious Trump-related dossier, Christopher Steele, and Steele’s apparent bias against then-candidate Trump, were withheld from the FISA court, and whether other exculpatory information was known to Rosenstein when he signed the final FISA renewal for Page in June 2017.
Fox News asked Baker after the deposition about the handling of the Trump dossier, what he told Rosenstein about exculpatory evidence, and whether he is the subject of an FBI leak investigation. Baker told Fox News he could not answer such questions.
John Solomon of The Hill, another ace reporter with good sources, has identified what may be the “explosive” source:
Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign.
Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm.
That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firmFusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump and Moscow were colluding to hijack the presidential election.
The dossier, though mostly unverified, was then used by the FBI as the main evidence seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in the final days of the campaign.
The revelation was confirmed both in contemporaneous evidence and testimony secured by a joint investigation by Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight committees, my source tells me.
It means the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.”
——————–
The collapse continues.
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The Cowardice of a “Conservative”
“The long descent of Arizona Republicans from Barry Goldwater to Jeff Flake is in many ways the story of the decline of the modern conservative movement.
As Tucker Carlson noted after watching Flake’s sad capitulation to Democrats’ preposterous demands for an FBI investigation of Brett Kavanaugh: “In Washington, when they congratulate you on leaving the partisan circus, chances are you are now the ringmaster of the partisan circus.”
But Flake’s failure is not just an individual one. It is representative of the failure of large portions of the conservative movement to adapt to the reality of Democrats’ no-holds barred tactics. Those tactics are not new, of course. The GOP’s insistence on having mild-mannered gentlemen as its standard bearers, however, has allowed the Democrats to hide their fundamental substantive and tactical radicalism in plain sight.
Mitt Romney and the Bushes (both senior and junior) were sincere old-school patricians who acted according to a moral code the Democrats had long since discarded. John McCain had a bit of street-fighter in him, but he used it only to fight conservatives and win the plaudits of liberals. One would have to go back to Ronald Reagan to find a GOP leader who challenged the power of liberalism without apology.
And then along came Donald Trump, who, whatever his personal and political deviations from the tenets of “movement conservatism,” at least recognized who his enemies were. If they punched him, he would punch back twice as hard. After decades of watching gentlemen absorb punches and give up the fight, this was why so many GOP voters supported him. Unfortunately, he inherited a party apparatus that largely insisted in playing by the old Democrat-fixed rules—which meant being the hapless Washington Generals to the Democrats Harlem Globetrotters.”
——————–
“Any Republican with just the tiniest amount of common sense would understand the Democrats’ obstruction strategy and the dangers of giving in to it. Even establishment squishes like Chuck Grassley and John Cornyn (who said, “I can’t think of a more embarrassing scandal for the United States Senate since the McCarthy hearings,”) and, most stunningly, Lindsey Graham, long a bane of conservatives, got it. Graham stunningly rose to the occasion with a four-minute evisceration of the Democrats unethical tactics.
“To my Republican colleagues,” Graham said, staring at Flake, “if you vote no, you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.” If that kind of statement from “Mr. Bipartisan” Graham couldn’t knock sense into Flake (and Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who have gotten a pass from conservatives here they don’t deserve) then they are long past saving.
Because of Flake’s cowardice, all future GOP officials taking controversial votes are at risk of becoming victims of the Left’s continual campaign of mob intimidation, harassment, and violence. Flake has shown the Democrats that mobocracy works. Shooting Republicans, beating up Republicans in the street, screaming at Republicans in elevators, chasing Republicans from restaurants. All of these have become “normalized,” to use the Left’s favorite term, in the wake of Trump’s election. There is nothing bipartisan or courageous about giving into the mob, abandoning your party, and soaking in the plaudits of the pundits along the way.
Sadly, Flake—who once headed the libertarian Goldwater Institute and had a strongly conservative voting record in the House before moving left as a Senator—has shown just how badly the thing people are pleased to call the “conservative movement” has failed to adapt to the reality that they face a totalitarian enemy in what passes as modern liberalism.
This wing of movement conservatives, dominated by NeverTrumpers such as Flake, has chosen to retreat into the comfortable womb of treating conservatism as a philosophical abstraction rather than dealing the messy realities of actual politics in which the options are often imperfect. The decline of Jeff Flake shows that NeverTrump corrupts and absolute NeverTrump corrupts absolutely.”
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Of course if Kavanaugh is confirmed after the FBI essentially exonerates him, Flake will have been proven right and both Kavanaugh and the Republicans will be in better shape than if they had tried to ram through the vote last week. Will The Cult then apologize to Flake? Only if instructed to do so by Dear Leader.
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Of course the FBI won’t “exonerate” Kavanaugh no matter what and how much evidence it obtains. Today’s Trump-hate mania tells us the reason of the hour (until this afternoon, when it will be a totally opposite reason)…
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Poor Ricky,
Did the bad man with the economics background hurt your feelings?
The author is Spencer P. Morrison, a writer and author of Bobbins, Not Gold. He is the editor-in-chief of the National Economics Editorial. He knows of what he speaks.
Perhaps you need a refresher. It has been awhile since you went to college, maybe things have changed since the old days. Or maybe you’re already paying the price for the ignorance you mentioned. 🙂
——————————
And just curious Kim, what is it you “liked” about Ricky’s comment?
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No Ricky,
He’ll still be a spineless amoeba who delayed things and put Kavanaugh and his family thru an unnecessary ordeal to score political points. He’ll still be a traitor.
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“NO HINT OF MISCONDUCT.”
https://www.tampabay.com/news/nationworld/senate-receives-fbi-report-on-kavanaugh-allegations-20181004/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
” The chairman of the Senate Judiciary says the FBI found “no hint of misconduct” in its background investigation of sexual misconduct claims against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Sen. Chuck Grassley says he’s received a briefing from staff on the confidential report. And the Iowa Republican says in a statement that “there’s nothing in it that we didn’t already know.”
He says the FBI couldn’t find any people who could “attest to any of the allegations” against Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh denies the allegations.
The FBI report was given to the Senate overnight. Senators are reading it Thursday in a secure room in the Capitol complex, but aren’t expected to discuss specific details of what they learn.
Grassley said it’s time to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination. The senator calls the federal judge one of “most qualified nominees to ever come before the Senate.””
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“Nothing we didn’t already know.”
http://dailycaller.com/2018/10/04/grassley-on-fbi-report-theres-nothing-in-it-ill-be-voting-to-confirm-judge-kavanaugh/
“Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley read the FBI supplemental report on Brett Kavanaugh and declared, “There’s nothing in it that we didn’t already know.”
The senator was briefed on the report at 8 a.m. Thursday and released a statement soon after promising a vote for Kavanaugh.
“It’s time to vote. I’ll be voting to confirm Judge Kavanaugh,” he said.
Grassley also said, “I trust that career agents of the FBI have done their work independent of political or partisan considerations. That’s exactly what senators from both sides asked for. Now it’s up to senators to fulfill their Constitutional duty and make a judgement.””
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There is a price to be paid for ignorance and Americans will soon be paying it.
There’s an aspect of crying wolf in your posts when literally all of America’s ills have Donald Trump as their source and cause. I mean, in what world is it the case that people who *hate* Trump didn’t also give us the education system we now have?
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Huh. I was recently told otherwise. Both sides are as motivated as they’ll get.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/10/poll-mid-kavanaugh-confirmation-circus-democrat-enthusiasm-gap-tanks/
“POLL: Mid-Kavanaugh Confirmation Circus, Democrat Enthusiasm Gap Tanks
“Turns out, launching a massive character assassination campaign for purely political purposes has consequences. Who knew?
According to NPR, Democrat enthusiasm has tanked since July when an NPR/PBS/Maris Poll showed Democrats surging ahead with a 10 point lead in voter enthusiasm.
That lead is now 2 points, or as NPR writes, “a statistical tie.”
NPR has more:
Democrats’ advantage on which party’s candidate they are more likely to support has also been cut in half since last month. Democrats still retain a 6-point edge on that question, but it was 12 points after a Marist poll conducted in mid-September.
The results come amid the pitched and hotly partisan confirmation battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Multiple women have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct when he was in high school and college. He categorically denies all the allegations. The FBI is conducting a supplemental investigation into the accusations that is expected to be wrapped up by the end of this week.
With Democrats already up fired up for this election, the Kavanaugh confirmation fight has apparently had the effect of rousing a dormant GOP base.
“The result of hearings, at least in the short run, is the Republican base was awakened,” noted Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll.
While Democrats and Republicans are now equally enthusiastic about the midterms, the story is very different for key Democratic base groups and independents. While 82 percent of Democrats say the midterms are very important, that’s true of just 60 percent of people under 30, 61 percent of Latinos and 65 percent of independents.
Democrats need to net 23 seats to take back control of the House, but if those groups stay home in large numbers, it would blunt potential Democratic gains. With 34 days to go until Election Day, it all points to another election dominated by party activists.”
—————–
The NPR link.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/03/654015874/poll-amid-kavanaugh-confirmation-battle-democratic-enthusiasm-edge-evaporates
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Huh.
Again.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/04/gop-senate-candidates-gain-traction-following-kavanaugh-testimony/
“Republican candidates in key Senate races are closing in on or beating their Democratic opponents following Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday.
Tennessee
A new Fox News poll shows that support among Tennessee voters for Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn is ahead of support for her Democratic opponent Phil Bredesen by five points, at 48-43 percent. Her lead in the polls for the soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat has jumped by two points since last month.”
——————–
The same thing happened in North Dakota, Arizona, and Missouri as well. 🙂
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Huh.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/04/conservative-women-will-make-democrats-pay-for-kavanaugh-in-november/
“Conservative Women Will Make Democrats Pay For Kavanaugh In November
Democrats assumed Republican women would play into their identity politics instead of seeking truth, and that assumption is blowing up in their faces.”
——————–
“Since the day Brett Kavanaugh was named as President Trump’s nominee to serve on The Supreme Court, women on the left have been angry. Now women on the right are even angrier. The media circus surrounding the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh have produced no evidence that he is, or ever was, the man that Democrats and the media have portrayed him to be. Many conservative women see an eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee standing his ground, while duly elected members of the Senate attempt to destroy his life and prevent him from serving on the nation’s highest court. These women are furious about the behavior of the left, and they don’t intend to stand for it.
With Senate races tightening all over the country as Election Day approaches, Republican women have shown tremendous fortification through the Kavanaugh hearings and allegations. In The Marist Poll released Wednesday, 83 percent of Republican women claim that the midterm elections are “very important,” a 12 percent increase from the same poll conducted in July. The treatment of Kavanaugh has lit a fire in the belly of conservative women. Enthusiasm among Democratic women actually fell two points — from 81 percent to 79 percent — over the same period.”
———————
“Emma Green of The Atlantic spoke to some very angry conservative women, who assured her there would be hell to pay in November. These women feel energized to stand up for what is right, to defend the integrity of a man and his family dragged through hell in the name of political gain, and to do whatever they can to prevent something similar happening in the future.
Democrats overplayed their hand with women in this country. They made a dangerous assumption that a man accused of sexual assault could not be exonerated to the public, and that all women would certainly take the side of the female accuser. They assumed Republican women would play into their identity politics instead of seeking truth, and that assumption is blowing up in their faces. Women who may have been feeling disillusioned by President Trump have found a new motivation to vote against Democrats in the Midterms.”
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Here’s The Atlantic piece.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/conservative-women-kavanaugh-ford/572023/
“Conservative Women Are Angry About Kavanaugh—And They Think Other Voters Are, Too
Local- and state-level leaders across the country say they’re ready to lash out against Democrats in the midterm elections.”
When many conservative women around the country watched Christine Blasey Ford appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, they didn’t find her testimony compelling or convincing, as many liberals did.
They saw a political farce.
“Honestly, I don’t think I have ever been so angry in all of my adult life,” says Ginger Howard, a Republican national committeewoman from Georgia. “It brings me to the point of tears, it makes me so angry.”
In interviews with roughly a dozen female conservative leaders from as many states, this was the overwhelming sentiment: These women are infuriated with the way the sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have been handled. They are not convinced by Ford or any other woman who has come forward. They resent the implication that all women should support the accusers. And they believe that this scandal will ultimately hurt the cause of women who have been sexually assaulted.
Above all, these women, and the women they know, are ready to lash out against Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.
Nearly all the women I spoke with are plugged into state- and local-level conservative politics. Their collective, overwhelming sense is that, like Howard, women voters are angry about what’s happening to Kavanaugh. “I’ve got women in my church who were not politically active at all who were incensed with this,” says Melody Potter, the chairwoman of the West Virginia Republican Party—the first woman to hold that position, she made sure to point out. In her state, the stakes of the Kavanaugh scandal are immense: Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is fighting for his seat in a place where more than two-thirds of voters supported Donald Trump in 2016. With voters “energized” to elect people “who are going to support President Trump,” Potter says, West Virginians are closely watching how Manchin acts on Kavanaugh—especially now that the situation has become so politicized.
Organizers in other states say they’ve been hearing the same thing. “People in Indiana are angry. They are mad. They are changing their mind,” says Jodi Smith, the Indianapolis-based state director for the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List. When Senator Joe Donnelly, another vulnerable Democrat who is up for reelection in November, declared late last week that he would vote against Kavanaugh, it “started a firestorm of epic proportions,” Smith says. From her perspective on the ground in a highly contested swing state, “this is one of the best things that could happen to us.”
It’s not yet clear whether the Kavanaugh affair will work to the GOP’s advantage; recent polling has not conclusively shown what women, for example, think about these allegations. “If the Republicans don’t get it together and make sure that he gets in there, that’s not going to help us,” says Howard, the Georgia RNC official. “What makes me mad at times about our party is we don’t stand up enough and say, ‘Enough of your shenanigans! We’re not putting up with this!’” And with the full Senate vote delayed and a supplemental FBI investigation under way, it’s not certain that Kavanaugh’s nomination will ultimately be successful.”
———————
Yeah Flake and Never-Trumpers, she’s referring to you. 🙂
But in their defense it is very hard to stand up when you have no spine.
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ted-koppel-very-legitimate-argument-that-democrats-treated-clintons-accusers-worse-than-kavanaughs/
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WASHINGTON – Legendary news anchor Ted Koppel said the Democratic Party is treating Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers differently than they treated former President Clinton’s accusers.
Juanita Brodderick, who came forward in the 1990s and accused Clinton of rape, recently said Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) ignored her deposition to independent counsel Ken Starr.
Feinstein and other Democrats currently serving on the Judiciary Committee, such as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), ultimately voted against Clinton’s impeachment.
PJM asked Koppel, who extensively covered Clinton’s impeachment as the anchor of ABC’s Nightline, about Brodderick’s recent statements.
“It’s true. I think it’s a very legitimate point. What do I think? It depends on whose ox is gored, right? It all depends on where you’re coming from on the political spectrum,” Koppel said after appearing on the Kalb Report for a discussion about “journalism in the age of Trump” at the National Press Club on Monday evening. …
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And from the same article at 1:05:
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… Koppel said Trump “has been wonderful” for cable news ratings.
“Your boss acknowledged as much months ago during the campaign,” he told Brian Stelter, host of Reliable Sources on CNN, referencing Jeff Zucker. …
… Koppel said CNN and MSNBC focus on Trump and related news almost all day and they are missing other important stories.
“Is there a moment of the day when they are not focusing on Donald Trump or some intimately related subject? It is, essentially, all I know, every once in a while. You know, if the number of people who died in Indonesia gets up to 1,000 they will give it a mention or two.” …
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@8:02 and @7:50 refer to a specific type of ignorance: economic illiteracy. No president in the last 80 years other than Trump has been so stupid as to start trade wars with most of our major trading partners.
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Ricky, you need your own cable station 🙂
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The FBI Report need not exonerate Kavanaugh to the satisfaction of any Democrats. It only needs to produce the votes of Flake and either Collins or Murkowski.
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Every president has various stupidities they seem to cherish, and there’s nothing about Trump’s that makes his somehow more egregious than others’.
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SolarP, 2:05 is your “Kim and I fell in love” moment. Even Ann Coulter has said that Trump is profoundly ignorant and lazy, and she was and is one of his biggest promoters.
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Meh. I already know Trump’s an intellectual child, Ricky. And I recognize some silly tweet isn’t as deranged as wanting to allow half-born babies to be murdered. You’re a weird one.
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Pretty good press conference going on with these GOP committee members right now. Articulating good stuff on hearing details as well as big picture stuff.
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2:05 and 2:29 If you “know Trump’s an intellectual child” would that not make his stupidity “more egregious than the others”?
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Ricky, no. Why would that follow?
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A Navy vet has been arrested for sending ricin envelopes to the president and others. I notice he’s smiling for the mug shot after confessing. The smiling will stop when he arrives in federal prison.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/utah-vet-confessed-sending-ricin-envelopes-officials-153525606.html
“A Utah Navy veteran confessed to sending four envelopes containing the substance from which ricin is derived to President Donald Trump and members of his administration, authorities said in court documents.
William Clyde Allen III, 39, made the confession while speaking with investigators after his arrest at his house in the small city of Logan, north of Salt Lake City, according to documents filed Wednesday night in a Utah court. He told them he had purchased castor beans and sent the letters that had the beans in them.
The documents filed to justify Allen’s arrest did not state a motive. He was being held on a $25,000 cash-only bond.
State investigators working with the FBI said the envelopes with ground castor beans were mailed last week to the president, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the Navy’s top officer, Adm. John Richardson.
Authorities have said the letters were intercepted and no one was injured. Castor beans can cause injury if swallowed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says
Investigators say all four letters tested positive for ricin.”
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SP, I would agree that no presidents are perfect and each has areas where he lacks knowledge. However, I think that most people would agree that no “intellectual child” has been President before. Trump’s cabinet and other aides were stunned to find out he was an “intellectual child”. That is why they called him an idiot, a moron, a dope, an eleven year old and a fifth grader. That hasn’t happened before. That level of stupidity is unlike anything that has happened before in this country.
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We don’t know him.
I agree with Ted Koppel– I’d love to see my paper skip one day of having the president on the front page.
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OK, Ricky. If that’s where your placing the goalposts for now, based on a few folks’ assertions, I’ll give you the extra point, for whatever say-nothing that is. But I’ll still believe that half-born baby killing thing is an intellectual shortcoming in some sense or other. Maybe just noetic. But I don’t know why the distinction matters.
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Good. Now let’s vote and wrap this up.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/36705/dem-sen-joe-manchin-strongly-signals-yes-vote-paul-bois
“Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), another potential swing vote in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, strongly signaled a “Yes” vote on Wednesday when he announced his reviewing process.
According to Manchin, he will base his vote on Kavanaugh’s life from age 22-53, not his life in high school, which Democrats have increasingly scrutinized in the past weeks amid allegations from Christine Blasey Ford that the SCOTUS nominee sexually assaulted her at a pool party 36 years ago.
“I am looking at the gentleman as an adult from 22 to 53, thirty-one years of professional service,” Manchin told Al-Jazeera. “I am looking at him as a father. As a person in a community, how he interacts with his community. I am trying to put the human side to it.”
Should Manchin vote “No” on Kavanaugh, he will severely anger his West Virginia constituents, who favor his confirmation to the Supreme Court by an overwhelming majority — a healthy 58%.
A “No” vote from Manchin would also contradict previous statements made by the senator, who said he would not allow Ford’s allegations to exclude Kavanaugh from the nomination process so long as they remained unsubstantiated and uncorroborated.”
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Flake concedes the obvious.
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And we have confirmation on number 3 of McCullough’s 3 predictions.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/36684/senate-judiciary-committee-statement-suggests-james-barrett
“Senate Judiciary Committee Statement Suggests Ford’s Legal Team Could Be In Trouble
“The ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct require a lawyer to consult with his or her client about the means to be used to accomplish the client’s objectives …”
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“The committee suggests that Ford’s lawyers have some major questions to answer regarding their apparent attempt to block their own client from knowing about the offer, which would be a clear violation of the ABA code of professional conduct.
“Clearly, Dr. Ford’s attorneys did not tell her that we could protect her privacy and speak to her in California,” the committee concludes. “The ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct require a lawyer to consult with his or her client about the means to be used to accomplish the client’s objectives—including informing the client of settlement offers. It is deeply unfortunate that Dr. Ford’s Democratic-activist lawyers appear to have used Dr. Ford in order to advance their own political agenda. A lot of pain and hardship could have been avoided had Dr. Ford’s attorneys informed her of the committee’s offer to meet her in California to receive her testimony.”
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Here’s the letter from the Judiciary Committee.
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/ford-wasnt-clear-committee-offered-california-interview-in-lieu-of-public-washington-hearing
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It would appear Collins is on board as well.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/36697/swing-vote-susan-collins-says-fbi-investigation-hank-berrien
“Swing Vote Susan Collins Says FBI Investigation ‘Appears Thorough.’
Feinstein Rips It, Admits She Hasn’t Read The Whole Report.”
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11:28 is great in two respects:
A. It now looks like with the FBI “exoneration” Kavanaugh will be confirmed. We will never know if he would have been confirmed last Friday without the brief FBI investigation proposed by Flake. The Cult may call him an “amoeba”, but Flake got Coons to sign off on the one week length of the FBI review, so the Dems can’t credibly argue for another extension. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, he should (and probably will) send a Thank you note to Flake. The Cult can then look for a new “traitor” to attack.
B. Speaking of which, we learned at 11:28 that you don’t have to post something rational to be suspected of “treason”. If you “like” a rational conservative post, you may be targeted by Trump Cult Inquisitors. The NeverTrump coalition hereby announces that anyone can “like” any post they desire without being accused of being a Trumpkin. However, if you actually post a defense of Trump “falling in love” with Kim (North Korean not ours), you are fair game.
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Sorry, the Inquisition referenced above was actually at 11:24.
We were told that 7:50 was written by Spencer P. Morrison, “Editor in Chief” of the National Economics Editorial. Let’s check on that source:
Better than the Black Pidgeon, but not by much.
We were told that Morrison “knows of what he speaks”. Surely, Morrison must have a degree in Economics? Right?
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Actually, no. Morrison has a B.A. in Ancient and Medieval History and a Law Degree from unnamed institutions.
https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/author/spencerpmorrisongmail-com/
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All this needling is way past tiresome. Please stop.
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