Day 624 Tuesday October 2, 2018 957 Days to Go
I realized today that we aren’t even halfway through this presidential term. We have another one hundred and sixty six and a half days to go to the halfway point. Can you believe that?
I have been on the road the last two weekends and writing a screed only got as far as this, which I never posted:
Day 619 Thursday September 27, 2018 962 Days to Go
Day 609 Thursday September 20, 2018 969 Days to Go
The Kavanaugh hearing continues. Dr. Ford to testify. She is one of now four women accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. Republicans are worried about a witch hunt, and they should know a thing or two about such matters, as should Kavanaugh, who was involved with the Whitewater Starr investigation. Talk about a witch hunt! Talk about sexual misconduct questioning, Kavanaugh should know as he was the one who demanded the most salacious details from Monica Lewinsky.
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(You may notice my clever way of keeping track of how many days up and down I need to go by cutting and pasting the previous post below the current day’s date to make certain I don’t screw it up! Then removing the previous post’s count; clever huh?)
So much has happened since I last posted, and yet nothing has changed. It’s more of the same. The same exhausting confusion and chaos. It turns out that is the way Trump likes things. He likes chaos underneath him. According to Bob Woodward’s book “FEAR” he likes to gives someone “all the chips” and then start taking them away, one by one. Can you imagine being told by Trump that he has total confidence in you and then hear via the grapevine that something or other is going on that contradicts that? Or that he tells you that you are doing a great job and then you learn you’ve already been fired?
Woodward’s book ends at the point where John Dowd, one of Trump’s lawyer’s tells Trump he can no longer represent him because, he, Trump, won’t listen to Dowd and take Dowd’s advice.
This is the same thing that Gary Cohen did. Quit because Trump wouldn’t take his advice.
Cohen and Dowd and others got tired of repeating the same things, the same points over and over and over again.
Take the trade deal with South Korea called KORUS. Trump wants to get out of it. He doesn’t like that we are spending a lot of money to keep troops in South Korea. Why should we he asks? Okay, maybe he doesn’t know. So he’s told. South Korea is one of the strongest democracies in that part of the world. It has one of the largest economies in the world, much bigger than its size suggests. It is a place from which to keep a close eye on North Korea. We have a surveillance station there that can let us know within seven seconds of a North Korean missile launch. It’s actually for our benefit to keep troops there. It’s much cheaper and safer than war.
None of this matters to Trump. The land that the surveillance system is located is crappy; wouldn’t even want to put a golf course on it. The South Koreans should pay for our being there. There’s a trade deficit with them. He wants out. And this goes on and on and on. Every few weeks he brings it up. He tells someone to draft something for him to sign, killing the trade agreement, pulling the troops out, moving the surveillance station to Alaska where we won’t know about a North Korean missile launch until it’s half way to the U.S.
This kind of behavior Woodard outlines in his book on many topics: pulling out of South Korea, building the wall, killing DACA, tariffs, pulling out of NATO, pulling out of Syria, or NAFTA. The same arguments, over the same issues, over and over again.
Meanwhile, Stephen Miller – a racist of the first order – stays around making immigration policy. Peter Navarro and Wilbur Mills are the ones making economic policy. Mills, best known for his shady business dealings with the Bank of Cyprus, and his insider stock trading deals, and Navarro an economist out of step with mainstream economic thought are setting the economic agenda. Facts be damned. Those two advocate for tariffs. So what if they hurt businesses in the U.S. ? Or that they increase the cost of goods for families? Somehow it’s a good thing. You’ll see. Just wait. Facts and evidence to the contrary be damned.
Let’s take tariffs on steel. Okay, most steel is produced outside the United States. Therefore, even if this helps steel plants in the U.S. they can’t make enough steel. We import steel to make things, like cars and dishwasher racks. Well, those folks are going to have to pay more for that steel. That means cars and dishwasher racks are going to cost more. Who is going to pay that increased price? Help me out here, the only persons I see paying for it is the U.S. consumer. This is called Economics 101. This ain’t hard to understand or figure out.
Okay, enough on that. Let’s move on to Devin Nunes. An interesting article came out about him and his family. They had a huge dairy farm in California. Made milk for Blue Bunny Ice Cream, still do. They sold the farm over a decade ago and bought land in Iowa for a dairy farm. It’s in Steve King’s district. Steve King is a big proponent of sending all the illegals back to where they came from. The Nunes family is Republican and back King. This is interesting because they depend on illegal immigrants to do the work on their dairy farm! In fact, every dairy farmer in Iowa depends on illegals. So do the meat packers and other farmers.
So why do these farmers back a representative who is so into getting rid of illegals and not backing someone who would help these people be able to stay and work? It’s a question without an answer.
Also, Devin Nunes claims his roots in the California dairy business but doesn’t mention his family hasn’t been involved in it for over a decade. Likewise the Nunes family in Iowa doesn’t mention Devin. They like all dairy farmers in Iowa are scared to death that ICE will come raid their diary farm and then they ask, “Who’s gonna milk the cows?”
It’s also interesting that some of the farmers talk about their illegal workers like family and like cattle. Such is the nature of prejudice.
Then we get to Brett Kavanaugh. Apparently, there were two hearings: the one that I saw, and the one that my right wing friends saw. In the right wing hearing Brett answered every question and was to be pitied as he nearly broke down from the mean questions as he valiantly fought off spurious attacks on his character. In that hearing Dr. Ford, while credible, was not to be believed. Well, maybe she was attacked, probably was, but not by Brett.
In the hearing I watched, a woman came forward and gave truthful unwavering answers to every question she was asked. She stated what she knew, and what she remembered and didn’t remember. It was heartbreaking, raw, and unequivocal. The woman prosecutor who asked questions for the Republicans was weak as a person asking questions. One of the prosecutors who commented afterwards said she had never seen such a weak performance.
Then came the afternoon session with Brett. He yelled. He cried. He accused. He was disrespectful. He bullied. He lied. He didn’t answer questions. He said he liked beer. He said he worked hard. He said he never blacked out. He said he never assaulted a woman or did anything like that. He claimed this was a hit job by the Clintons and Democrats and the left wing against his name and his family.
He ought to know about hit jobs. That was what he was known for when he worked on the Starr investigation where it was well known he hated the Clintons, especially Hillary. His job on the Starr commission was to leak the most hurtful and salacious details to the press. When he was rising in the ranks of the Republican circles he hung out at a town house with Ann Coulter and Kelly-Ann Conway’s husband and Tucker Carlson. Conway’s husband at the time headed up a group of lawyers that were digging into the Clinton’s past in Arkansas to find anything they could to bring up in court to embarrass the Clintons. Yes, Brett knows about hit jobs.
Then there’s the lying: small lies and big lies. I didn’t realize at the time how many there were; others have gone on about them in great detail. I’ll only mention a few. He said boofing was another term for barfing. It’s not. It means being given an enema with booze. It gets you drunker quicker. Then there’s the “alumnus” reference to a woman throughout his yearbook. He said it means she was a good friend. This despite a poem saying that you could always get a date with this woman, but date didn’t seem to be the implication here. Maybe not intercourse, but groping for sure. Look, I get it. When you are trying to figure out sex and sexuality and all that stuff it’s awkward. At the time Brett was developing, and when I was too, there was this idea, very prevalent among Catholics and Jews and maybe everyone in our society, that there are good girls and bad girls. Girls you marry and girls you do other things with. I never understood that reasoning but I know it was there. Heck, there are songs written about it. John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Life goes on, … behind the Tastee Freeze, I was trying to get my hands between Diane’s knees…” and other much more graphic descriptions: Ten Years After’s “School Girl” or Stephen Tyler singing in AeroSmith “Walk this Way” leaves nothing to the imagination.
But “Devil’s Triangle”? I had never heard the term before the hearing. Well, the boys at Georgetown Prep sure knew it. Whether this was a case of idle boasting with no action or whether they really participated in a menage a trois of two boys and one girl is not known. What is known is that Kavanaugh said under oath that it was a drinking game. Maybe, it was in his mind. Maybe while they had a girl on all fours and were entering here from either end they were flipping quarters on her back and drinking. Maybe. But I have also learned that shortly after Kavanaugh’s testimony the entry for “Devil’s Triangle” in Wikipedia was changed to say it was a drinking game. This came from someone with a Congressional IP address. Is this the left wing conspiracy Brett speaks of?
I was also struck by a comment made by a woman who was on the staff of the Judical Committee when Kavanaugh come up for district judge. It took W Bush’s team several years to get that appointment through because there were problems with his record at the time and evidence then, as now, that he hadn’t been truthful under oath. It is now known that a staffer on Orrin Hatch’s staff stole emails from Senator Pat Leahy and showed them to Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh says he had no idea they were stolen. People in the know find that hard to believe. But the comment that got me by this woman was that Kavanaugh had a very thin judicial record, and for someone being appointed for life to the bench that’s a bit of a problem. (Thin as in, never tried a case in court. He was a law clerk.)
There are also the witnesses to Brett’s drinking in high school, college, and on the Starr commission. He was a heavy drinker. He got sloppy drunk. It’s hard for then to imagine that he didn’t pass out at times. He would get belligerent and aggressive when drunk, especially towards women.
Was the incident that Dr. Ford described an occasion where Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge were attempting to force her into a Devil’s Triangle? I think it likely.
Then there’s Kavanaugh’s extreme views on some cases: like Roe v Wade, like Nixon and presidential authority. There is a case to be heard soon by the Supreme Court that could strip away the state protection to go after someone even if they were pardoned by the president. Yeah, that’s right. Trump could pardon someone and the pardon would hold up in State courts as well.
We are only into the Trump presidency for 624 days. We are looking at Brett Kavanaugn being on the Supreme court for 10,950 or 14,650 days. That’s thirty or forty years.
He has displayed a lack of temperament to be a judge. He has displayed, repeatedly, that he would not be impartial in cases involving Democrats, especially the Clintons or their friends. He has written and spoken extensively about curbing women’s rights, and has displayed a lack of knowledge about reproduction and contraception.
He is an extremist, a bully, a drunk, a sexual predator, and a political hack that has done much dirty work. This is not the kind of person we need sitting on any judicial bench.
Yet, this is where we are.
I find it hard to fathom how any Republican Senator who knows a woman be it a wife, daughter or someone they dated could vote for this person.
Yet, here we are.
Meanwhile, the Republicans passed another $1.5 trillion dollar tax cut for the super rich.
957 Days to Go
PS Dead Fish
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