"... stemming from what NBA commissioner Adam Silver called 'disturbing and heartbreaking' allegations of harassment and violence toward female employees within the organization, the league announced Wednesday. The NBA launched an investigation seven months ago following a Sports Illustrated report in February which described 'a corporate culture rife with misogyny and predatory sexual behavior' that spanned decades in the Mavericks' organization... 'First, just an apology to the women involved,' Cuban told ESPN. '... This is not something that just is an incident and then it's over. It stays with people. It stays with families. And I'm just sorry I didn't see it. I'm just sorry I didn't recognize it.' While Cuban himself was not cited in any of the incidents of harassment or misconduct, the NBA said that he didn't pay enough attention to the business culture within the Mavericks' organization...."
Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, asked consultants to scour the backgrounds of four outspoken Democrats — Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, two sources close to the administration said....
The White House believes both Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren are “too old” to mount a serious campaign three years from now, sources said....
Have we ever had such a vulnerable President and so few credible contenders?
"Isn't it clear that delay advantages the Dems only if Kavanaugh is confirmed? The theory that explains every action the accuser and the Dems have taken is: they want the confirmation to occur as close as possible to the midterm elections in order to enrage the Dem base into turning out in huge numbers. If Kavanaugh is defeated close to the midterms, it is the GOP base that will be enraged into turning out. Same result (though likely to a lesser extent) if the Dems induce Kavanaugh to withdraw or delay the vote past the midterms. And Kavanaugh's confirmation will not move the Court so significantly to the right as to outweigh the potential advantage of controlling both houses of Congress. The Dems want Kavanaugh confirmed, under circumstances that will enrage the Dem base as much as possible, and as close to the midterm election date as possible. "
I disagree with "And Kavanaugh's confirmation will not move the Court so significantly to the right as to outweigh the potential advantage of controlling both houses of Congress," but there's a lot of interesting analysis about the goals and the timing that I think will get a good conversation started.
"What he hadn’t prepared me for was falling in love with a real person. To be sure, hormones were driving me to have sex with Donna. But it was also something more transcendent. As Saint Ambrose once put it, lovers embracing seem to be attempting to breathe their souls into each other. Again, rock ’n’ roll seemed to describe the powerful parallel world I was entering. Where my parents and their generation considered lovemaking a wonderful taboo not to be spoken of in detail, and [the sex-ed teacher] Mr. Ward reduced it to Marxism and moving parts, the songs I loved told me that it could be both—the swiveling hips of Elvis and the tender ballads of the Fab Four; the erotic dynamism of Little Richard and the moonlit romance of Van Morrison. To put it in theological terms, the music made the connection between agape, the love of God, and eros, physical desire. At night, from Joe’s room, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, the Allman Brothers, and the blues musicians he loved would serenade me with the wonder of love."
I'm overhearing the television, so I'm not going to link to anything, but I keep hearing the indicia of elite status — notably, that Blasey is a college professor.
I'm trying to think of how her allegations should be handled, and I want like cases to be treated alike. When will one allegation from long ago justify delaying the Senate confirmation process and the opening of new investigations?
The answer cannot be: when the accuser has elite status!
I'm thinking of how Paula Jones was denigrated 20 years ago. "If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find," James Carville said famously.
[Carville] with Hillary's assent — set the tone on how the Clintons would treat women who dared accuse former President Clinton of sexual harassment....
[Paula Jones] wasn't fancy or rich, just a working woman sexually harassed by Bill when he was governor of Arkansas. But she was denigrated by Clinton's top advisers as "trailer park" trash, as someone so craven she'd crawl on dirt for the cash to slander Bill.
She was telling the truth. It was a straightforward sexual harassment case. If Bill had been a private-sector CEO, he'd have been fired.
But Hillary and Bill fought back, using the "nuts and sluts strategy," denigrating Jones and others, including Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and the intern Monica Lewinsky.
So what is the standard we are creating? How will we apply it in the future? I'm seeing analogies to Anita Hill, but how is Christine Blasey Ford like Anita Hill other than that she's challenging a Supreme Court nominee? Anita Hill worked with the nominee (Clarence Thomas) in a professional context. That was not in question. With Blasey, we only have her assertion that she was once in a room with Brett Kavanaugh. How will we treat other women who assert that they were once with the nominee? What is the principled plan that we can agree on?!
The NYT has an interactive map that lets you click on counties in the U.S. and see what other counties are connect to it through Facebook friending.
Even in Washington, D.C., nearly half of friendship links extend to people who live within 100 miles. Nationwide, in the average county, 63 percent of friendship links are that close, probably reflecting that many people on Facebook know one another through real-world sites like grade schools, colleges and offices....
If we were to divide the United States into two regions, merging counties that are most closely connected to one another, we would get a very simple map. It would not show the coasts versus the heartland, or red America versus blue America.
It would show, simply, all of the continental U.S. and Alaska in one region, and far-off Hawaii in the other. Divide the country further, and cohesive regions become clear at different scales. Northern Florida merges with southern Georgia. Texas and California splinter. Divide the country into 50 regions, and you get something that looks like how we might redraw our state borders to reflect the social worlds people in America inhabit today....
I'm thinking of this question a propos of Stormy Daniels's discussion of Donald Trump (blogged here). I've never thought about this question before, even though I have a large head, which I've only ever thought of as a problem when shopping for hats...
... which is the main point of that video. But I'm seeing some discussion from body-builders who worry about the distortion of perception from a large head: Your body will be perceived as smaller.
And here's a woman angsting over the opposite problem (in Elle, a fashion magazine):
I'm convinced that [my head is] too small for my body, and only if I'm at an impossible-to-maintain weight (for me that would be 123 pounds for my 5'7" height) do I look balanced....
Hmm. There's a benefit to having a large head. You can weigh more. (Also factor in the added weight of the head itself!)
Actors are known to have large heads, which are thought to translate better to the screen, and the actress as determiner of beauty ideals has never been stronger....
"Hmm," [says casting director Meredith Tucker], "I saw Carey Mulligan in The Seagull on Broadway and thought, Here's this amazing actress, but she'll never make it on screen; her head is too small. Then she did. So I think it's a myth." She pulls away from the receiver to consult her associate. "Yes!" she hollers. "It is true." I hear the words "Philip Seymour Hoffman" in the distance....
Actors are big heads on the screen, and it doesn't seem to matter too much if they are short. Maybe it's preferable for them to be short. And once you get some shortish, big-headed actors in the movies, you don't want to bring in actors who will distract viewers into thinking about head size.
[T]he head, the female head in particular, it turns out, is a locus of much social meaning. Stanford professor Londa Schiebinger... tells me that... [c]apacious skulls were viewed as a sign of greater intelligence and thus the ability to reason. Women, who have smaller skulls than men on average, were said to have limited reasoning capacity, a belief presented during the suffrage era as an argument against our getting to vote. The theory hit an impasse when data grew and it became evident that women have proportionately larger skulls than men. But science in the service of the patriarchy found a way out. "Who else has proportionately larger heads?" Schiebinger asks. "Children! So this became a way of labeling women as more childish than men, rather than smarter."
One could argue that figures such as Betty Boop were a particularly reassuring sex symbol. As unchallenging and loving as babies. Have I not always coveted a bouffant, or at least more hair, because it inflates the head and helps achieve the sexy baby effect?....
Seems fair to say that Democrats' polling is underwhelming in states and districts with large numbers of Hispanic voters. At the same time, polling has sometimes lowballed Democrats' numbers in these areas.
Me, responding to Meade, who re-articulated: "'Robot brothels.' They're 'dehumanizing and dangerous.'"
Me, looking for the link to whatever he's reading: "Are you really reading 'dehumanizing and dangerous'?" Because I was Googling that phrase and not finding the article. Suddenly: "Oh! It's in a British paper!"
"When Daniels came out of the bathroom, she claims Trump was lying on the bed in his underwear. They had sex. She then describes his genitalia in great detail. 'His penis is distinctive in a certain way,' she writes. Proof, her attorney Michael Avenatti says, she is tired of being called a liar by Trump’s people."
Oh, look! It's Roseanne. 1998. Dragging out the penile details:
Is the woman lying? To ask the question is to express a desire for corroborating evidence. If the offense is sexual, I'm afraid the evidence might trigger your ickiness reaction. Too bad! How would you like it if you stopped by to see the governor and he whipped it out, erect, and said "kiss it"? You're only hearing about it, not suffering through it.
[Paula Jones's] lawyers have... named... women believed to be former girlfriends of the President, including Gennifer Flowers. She is the woman named during the 1992 election campaign as his long-time mistress, who has steadfastly refused to speak against him.
The strategy is two-fold: to show "a pattern of behaviour" in Mr Clinton's past and to demonstrate the veracity of an affidavit Ms Jones reportedly swore when she first brought her case three years ago that could prove her case. In the affidavit, Ms Jones apparently describes "distinguishing characteristics" of Mr Clinton's "genital area".
Last month, it seemed the puzzle of the distinguishing characteristics had been solved, when newspapers quoted "sources" as saying she referred to a curvature of the President's erect penis - a phenomenon said to be caused by Peyronie's disease. The theory was backed up by more "informed sources" saying that Mr Clinton had been tested for this condition during his annual medical examination the previous week.
Did we ever find out if Bill Clinton is really bent like that? The Onion had the story in 2005: "Bill Clinton Finally Just Shows America His Penis." Funny, right? It was 2005, and #MeToo hadn't clicked in yet. But time's up now. And it's not funny anymore.
ADDED: You may have reached the end of this post with the question what is "distinctive" about Trump's genitalia. And good for you if you didn't. What a fine person you are! If you did, you don't have to by Stormy's book to get the answer. The NY Post has it. Should I just send you there, or should I quote "He knows he has an unusual penis... It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool…like the mushroom character in Mario Kart"?
I cannot watch the video without screaming at the screen. Having turned it off after a few seconds, I will blog from the text:
MADDOW: “If the Brett Kavanaugh nomination is now hurdling into the suns..."
"Hurdling" or "hurtling"? Is the nomination running on its own and jumping over obstacles or has it been thrown with great force?
"... which is what I think, and that’s just my take on it. I don’t know if that will be proven right or wrong, there is the question about how the Senate should handle this matter going forward. I mean, there is this screwy precedent now where Republicans would not let President Obama fill an opening on the Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Scalia for nearly a year until they got another shot at the White House in the 2016 election. Some Republican senators during the election campaign said that if you were elected in 2016, they fully intended to hold that seat open for all four years if necessary to give a Republican another shot at holding it. Given that extreme recent history, do you think that Democrats should play that kind of hardball too, be prepared to use those kinds of tactics so as not to be sort of the Patsy being pushed around on this, or do you think Democrats should just go through regular order with whoever Trump has to put up next if the Kavanaugh nomination fails?”
(Funny to capitalize "Patsy."*) But that's a great, well-framed question by Rachel Maddow. I just have a problem with the interlocutor, Hillary Clinton, who worked hard to push back the women who accused her husband. She has no credibility on this issue. Make her talk about Juanita Broaddrick first!
CLINTON: “What I would like to see is a democratic majority that actually has the chance to make that choice right now the Democrats have very few tools at their disposal to stop the Republicans from going full speed ahead and engaging in the kind of unprecedented behavior as they did with the Garland nomination. So I’m not in favor of either unilateral disarmament or Defcon-10."
I had to look up "Defcon-10." Urban Dictionary, with lots of down votes, says it means "awesome." Wikipedia has an entry for "Defcon," showing levels of military readiness that begin at 5, the lowest level, normal readiness, and go up to 1 — "maximum readiness," "imminent nuclear war."
Why would Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, say "Defcon-10"? What is that, one tenth of normal readiness?! Does she not know Defcon is a 5-point scale and that the lower the number, the more intense the situation? Saying "Defcon-10" is stupider than saying "It goes up to 11" or "I support him 1,000%," because she not only got the scale wrong, she had it going in the wrong direction.
"I think there has to be some effort to try to get back to regular order, try to get back to having a system, a process in place so that we are not subjected to the hardball behavior of the Republicans.... I mean, there can’t be one set of rules for Democrats and one set of rules for Republicans...."
That is, we need to play hardball, because they play hardball. We'd be foolish to unilaterally disarm.
That’s one of the reasons why people don’t have any confidence in the Congress. How can you? You don’t know what’s going to happen from day to day. I remember back in the Thomas hearing when senator bird...
Patsy Bird?!
... was asked what he was going to do....
"He" = him:
... and he said in a situation like this we should give the benefit of the doubt to the court and the country. And that’s what the Republicans should be doing right now, from the White House down Pennsylvania avenue to the Senate, give the benefit of the doubt to the court and the country. And that means have an investigation that will then lead to a hearing that will then lead to a vote if appropriate.
This is the new move of the Democrats: After Republicans acceded to a hearing, they demanded an investigation. To be followed by hearing. And with the words "a vote if appropriate," Hillary reveals the planned goal: There will never be a vote. Make that happen.
And instead, they are playing the hardest of hardballs...
They are playing hardball. You're playing, what? Rope a dope?
... to try to pack the court with, you know, another nominee, regardless of the questions....
Everyone is always trying to pack the Court. The other side will always have more questions. It's challenging to play from the down position, but the Democrats are trying. It's working pretty well too!
But do I need to hear from Hillary on this subject?
That's — and I'm choosing my words carefully — looney tunes.
__________________
* "Patsy" is a common noun. It means, to quote the unlinkable OED, "A person who is easily taken advantage of, esp. by being deceived, cheated, or blamed for something; a dupe, a scapegoat." But it originated as a proper noun, in the context of — surprise! — a minstrel show:
1889 H. F. Reddall Fact, Fancy & Fable 404 A party of minstrels in Boston, about twenty years ago, had a performance... When the pedagogue asked in a rage, ‘Who did that?’, the boys would answer, ‘Patsy Bolivar!’... The phrase..spread beyond the limits of the minstrel performance, and when a scapegoat was alluded to, it was in the name of ‘Patsy Bolivar’..the one who is always blamed for everything.
And I was standin' there in front of that flag
With a car bomb between my legs
You know, I felt so free of death beyond me
I felt so free, the F.B.I. is looking for me baby
But they'll never gonna find me, no
They can hunt me down like a dog
And I will stay on the run
And they can speculate what I'm feelin'
But daddy, daddy, you'll never know just what I was feelin'
But I'll tell you
I am no little pretty little rich girl
I am nobody's million dollar baby I am nobody's patsy anymore
I'm nobody's million dollar baby I'm nobody's patsy anymore
And I feel so free...
AND: I had a feeling I'd riffed on "patsy" before. Here: "Let's look at the word 'patsy' — used yesterday by Donald Trump to describe the United States" — back in 2015. Look how similar my stream of consciousness was, complete with Patti Smith. BUT: In the old post, I had Lee Harvey Oswald. That was suggested by Meade though, and didn't come out of my stream of consciousness. My stream got diverted.
For example, in "Friends," the friends are watching TV, and the character Joey — who is an actor (played, of course, by an actor) — says: "It really hit me last night. I'm gonna be on 'Days of our Lives.' And then I started thinkin' about all of you, and how these are the days of our lives.”
There must be a hundred examples of characters on TV watching TV and speaking as if they are real people and saying something about the TV/reality distinction, giving us the joke of seeing them on TV while we're here in reality. For all I know, there's a sitcom where the characters are watching that episode of "Friends" and hearing and commenting on that very line "these are the days of our lives."
Could somebody else collect all those examples and make a montage for me?
By the way, back in the 90s, that line would be called "going meta," and it was a very popular comic device. Maybe it got overused and trite and was largely abandoned, and I'm liking it in a kind of retro-throwback-ironic way. Nostalgic for going meta?! What a concept!
There's other going meta just in that episode. For example, Marlo Thomas is playing Jennifer Aniston's character's mother, and Marlo ("Mrs. Green") keeps enthusing about how she wants to live like her daughter ("Rachel") — single, free, in NYC. This involves getting a divorce from Rachel's father. Rachel says, "Couldn't she have just copied my haircut?" That's funny because in real life, the Rachel haircut was the rage. A photograph of Rachel was probably the most-shown-to-a-hairstylist photograph ever.
If you think too much about "going meta" you'll be ready to close the door on it again too. Go ahead, shut that door. It's over there. In the fourth wall.
I'm used to being the blogger, and readers come to me, and they comment here. Over on Facebook, I'm a passive reader and an occasional commenter. I do very bland posts of my own sometimes, mostly of the here's-how-Lake-Mendota-looked-today kind.
I should probably never comment on a political thread (other than my son John's posts, which are feel very much like a blog I'd love to read outside of Facebook). But I do sometimes see awful things that other people have written and feel called to say, for example, as I wrote yesterday (not on one of John's posts), "Eliminationist rhetoric. Humans visualized as insects. Is this where you want to go?"
The response I got from this person made me want to sign off Facebook and never look back.
IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin said:
So there's some insect-related hot button so far unrevealed.
Thanks for prompting me to add my "insect politics" tag.
I think the Democrats believed the Kavanaugh accusation would play out differently, that Republicans would resist and obstruct, but Trump saw how they were playing and chose not "to play into their hands."
Here's the quote in context:
"I feel so badly for him that he's going through this, to be honest with you. I feel so badly for him. This is not a man that deserves this... this should have been brought up long ago and that's what you have hearings for, you don't wait until the hearing is over and then all of a sudden bring it up. When Senator Feinstein sat with Judge Kavanaugh for a long period of time a long, long meeting. She had this letter, why didn't she bring it up? Why didn't she bring it up then? Why didn't the Democrats bring it up then? Because they obstruct and because they resist. That's the name of their campaign against me. Resist. And they just obstruct. And, frankly, I think they're lousy on policy and in many ways they're lousy politicians, but they're very good on obstruction. And it's a shame. Because this is a great gentleman. With all of that, I feel that the Republicans, and I can speak for myself, we should go through a process, because there shouldn't even be a little doubt. There shouldn't be a doubt. Again, they knew what they were doing. They should have done this a long time ago, three months ago, not now. But they did it now. So I don't want to play into their hands."
You can think about how the hand would have played out if the Republicans had been the ones to "obstruct and... resist." I think that's what the Democrats pictured, when they waited until after the hearings: "They did it now." Trump sees that as a deliberate play, and he's not going to let it work the way they planned. After what they did... "we should go through a process." That's surprising. Now, what are they to do?
The mysterious silence from Dr. Blasey and her lawyers was another turn in a drama that has gripped the Capitol since Thursday....
Dr. Blasey, thrust suddenly into a spotlight that she never sought, has been inundated with vulgar email and social media messages, and even death threats.... Dr. Blasey, who has two teenagers, has moved out of her house, is arranging for private security for herself and her family, and is effectively in hiding, [an unnamed person close to her told the NYT]....
Democrats and Republicans, meanwhile, are clashing over the scope and shape of the hearings. Mr. Grassley said Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey would be the only witnesses, prompting pushback from top Democrats, who are demanding an F.B.I. investigation to search for additional witnesses or evidence, and to avoid the specter of a “he said, she said” debate that will not get at the truth.
One possible witness is a friend of Judge Kavanaugh’s, Mark Judge, who Dr. Blasey said was in the room with Judge Kavanaugh when the assault occurred. Mr. Judge had told the Judiciary Committee that he does not remember the episode and has nothing more to say, seemingly foreclosing the possibility of an additional witness interview, at least for now.
He could be asked about his problems with alcohol-induced amnesia, his observation of Kavanaugh's drinking, and any alcohol-induced amnesia he saw in Kavanaugh, and he could be pressured to admit that he's unreliable as a witness to the nonoccurrence of any event from his heavy-drinking years.
“We have two diametrically opposed stories,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor. “My view: Professor Ford is telling the truth. But if you don’t want the hearing to be just a ‘he said, she said’ affair, an independent investigation, a background check by the F.B.I., is essential.... We must not repeat the mistakes of the Anita Hill hearings,” he said. “They were rushed, and they were a debacle.”
That is, once the hearing was scheduled, Democrats switched to saying they didn't want it. And Blasey (Ford) seems to have become unavailable. Going public with the accusation now looks a bit like a bluff. But — not wanting to play into their hands — the bluff was called. And now they want a new deal: an independent investigation. Trump rejected that (in the clip above).
Anita Hill has been brought in, with an op-ed in the NYT, saying the Clarence Thomas hearings were not done right and the Senate needs to handle the woman's allegations about sexual misconduct properly this time. She says "The job of the Senate Judiciary Committee is to serve as fact-finders, to better serve the American public, and the weight of the government should not be used to destroy the lives of witnesses who are called to testify." But her idea of fact-finding is not for the Senators to question Blasey directly, according to Hill, who says:
Select a neutral investigative body with experience in sexual misconduct cases that will investigate the incident in question and present its findings to the committee. Outcomes in such investigations are more reliable and less likely to be perceived as tainted by partisanship. Senators must then rely on the investigators’ conclusions, along with advice from experts, to frame the questions they ask Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey. Again, the senators’ fact-finding roles must guide their behavior. The investigators’ report should frame the hearing, not politics or myths about sexual assault.
So the new hand has been dealt. How do you not play into that? I'm using Trump's idiom. If it seems wrong, let's talk about that.
ADDED: This post caused me to do a fair amount of research into the phrase "play into their hands." I'm not sure what the original metaphor is, but you can see from the post that I assumed it was poker. Anyway, the phrase means to do something that unwittingly advantages your opponent.
With three hours to go until the president’s address to Congress, Rhodes grabs a big Gatorade and starts combing through the text of the State of the Union address. I peek over his shoulder, to get a sense of the meta-narrative that will shape dozens of thumb-suckers in the days and weeks to follow. One sentence reads: "But as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands." He retypes a word, then changes it back, before continuing with his edit. "Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks, twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages — they pose an enormous danger to civilians; they have to be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence."
Later, she said, “Look I believe she is credible... But based on what I know at this stage she is credible,” which doesn't explicitly walk back the idea that maybe not everything Blasey said is true.
But then Feinstein came back with a sledgehammer: "During every step of this process, I’ve found every single piece of information from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford eminently credible, sincere and believable. She knew this would have a huge effect on her life and she was incredibly brave to come forward."
Trump is making us the story by making us the in-house villain of his rallies.... My colleagues’ instinct has been to fight back. During a live stand-up from Trump’s Tampa rally this week, CNN’s Jim Acosta was taunted by the crowd, which had been chanting “fake news,” “go home” and “CNN sucks.” Said Acosta: “We’re staying right here. We’re going to do our job and report on this rally to all of our viewers here tonight.”
A noble sentiment, but better to “go home” — so Trump can’t use the scenes to his benefit. Eric Trump retweeted video of Trump supporters chanting “CNN sucks” at Acosta during his stand-up, adding the hashtag #Truth. The president retweeted his son....
Stop letting him make us the story.
UPDATE: I just heard on the Tucker Carlson show that Blasey has announced that she will not testify until after an independent investigation is done.
"I could see the rails stretching in front of me — school, university, career. I could picture myself as one of those people jam-packed in a rush-hour train. I wanted to derail myself."
That's the opinion of Yusaku Maezawa, who, as a student at a Tokyo high school, got fed up with the hour and a half train commute. He absconded to Santa Monica, California, skateboarded and played punk rock music 6 months, then returned to Japan to market T-shirts and CDs and enough other things to became a billionaire.
Now, that hater of riding on tracks has bought all the seats SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket's trip around the moon. The ship leaves in 2023. (WaPo.)
The interstellar trip is all part of Maezawa’s grand project, which he has named Dear Moon. His plan is to bring with him six to eight artists from various disciplines, including film, architecture, painting, sculpture and photography, with the goal that upon their return to Earth they create works inspired by the experience....
“There are so many artists with us today that I wish could create amazing works of art for humankind, for children of the next generation.”... Maezawa said his team of artists will be recruited from around the world, adding, “If you should hear from me, please say yes and accept my invitation. Please don’t say no.”
What kind of artist would say yes? Who would say no... and why? You become part of his project, which he has already named. Dear Moon. You'd have to be a group project artist, and I'm thinking most artists are fiercely solitary. But you'll get a lot of publicity, and you only have to put up with being packed into a scary tube for a week. What the hell!!
"The former serves to lift men’s souls to higher levels of reality, and therefore to God. The latter so often plunges men’s minds into degrading and immoral depths."
Wrote the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1957, in Ebony magazine, where he was writing as an advice columnist and answering a question from a 17-year-old who said he played gospel music and rock ’n’ roll" and wanted to know if that was okay. MLK said the 2 forms of music were "totally incompatible."
... but 2 of the things that I actually watched this past year won. There's RuPaul (for best reality show), seen here in a press conference after winning, and displaying great moderating and marketing expertise as well as a nice Statue-of-Liberty suit and bright orange shoes:
And "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" won for best comedy, best comedy actress, and best comedy supporting actress. Here's Rachel Brosnahan picking up the best actress award:
Don't know why I picked 2 shows that those who watched all the shows picked, because those are about the only current shows I watched.
"... hiring actors, donning disguises, printing official-looking letterheads, staging news conferences and having the media swallow the story hook, line and sinker — entailed, for better or worse, a level of old-time craftsmanship whose like will almost certainly not be seen again.... Mr. Abel’s first major hoax, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA — which sought 'to clothe all naked animals that appear in public, namely horses, cows, dogs and cats, including any animal that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches' — began in 1959.... Over the next few years, the organization’s activities (including a 1963 picket of the White House by Mr. Abel, who demanded that the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, clothe her horses) were faithfully reported by news organizations, among them The Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and CBS News.... Then there was Omar’s School for Beggars, a New York City institution founded amid the recession of the 1970s, which claimed to teach the nouveau poor the gentle art of panhandling.... the subject of credulous coverage by many news outlets, including The Miami Herald and New York magazine.... There were also the Topless String Quartet, with which, Mr. Abel said, an unsuspecting Frank Sinatra wanted to book a recording session; the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, which, he said, the failed presidential candidate and former Klan grand wizard David Duke briefly accepted an invitation to conduct; Females for Felons, a group of Junior Leaguers who selflessly donated sex to the incarcerated; the mass 'fainting' of audience members during a live broadcast of 'The Phil Donahue Show'; his 'discovery' (he posed as a former White House employee) of the missing 18½ minutes from the Watergate tapes; Euthanasia Cruises ('For people who wanted to expire in luxury,' Mr. Abel’s website recounted); Citizens Against Breastfeeding.... To some observers, Mr. Abel’s antics were a Rabelaisian delight. To others, especially members of the news media who had been taken in, they were an unalloyed menace."
Kavanaugh's accuser might never be able to provide a specific time and place for the alleged attack, and you may think Kavanaugh will do all right simply avowing that he has no memory of ever doing anything like that. That answer creates the occasion for any other woman to come forward and say he did something like that to me, and it will be relevant not just to his actions long ago, but his truthfulness in the present.
But the bigger problem is that Kavanaugh can only say he has no memory of something. And Kavanaugh's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, is telling us that he was very drunk, so maybe a failure to remember could be attributed to drinking. He could honestly testify to no memory of the incident, but still need to establish that he didn't have a memory blanked out by alcohol use. Now, since we're not going to hear of the specific time and place of the incident, Kavanaugh will need to say that he never, in that entire period, experienced alcohol-induced amnesia. (And what if he can only say I have no memory of losing my memory?!).
If Kavanaugh denies ever experiencing alcohol-induced amnesia during that period, anyone who hung out with him back then is a potential source of testimony that they saw him drunk and, especially damning, they had reason to know that he couldn't remember what he had done. Is there anybody who knew Kavanaugh in high school who has tales of things Kavanaugh couldn't remember later? Did Kavanaugh ever have a discussion with anyone about alcohol-induced amnesia?
Once we get this far, you can see that whether Christine Blasey Ford's story is accurate or not, Monday's hearing can be used to trap Kavanaugh in lies, and then it's not a possible attempted rape from 30 years ago but perjury in the present.
Remember, the other person in the room, according to Ford, was Mark Judge, and Mark Judge seems inclined to corroborate Kavanaugh, but Judge is on record as a having been "completely annihilated" in high school. I'm reading that in HuffPo:
But Mark Judge, now a writer and filmmaker, wrote [a] memoir two decades ago... Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk, of getting drunk his first time at age 14, binge drinking at teen parties and a struggle with alcoholism. His “immersion” into alcohol began the end of his sophomore year during a typical annual “beach week,” when Catholic high school students headed to the shore after school was out. “Now I had an opportunity to make some headway [with girls]. Most of the time everyone, including the girls, was drunk. If you could breathe and walk at the same time, you could hook up,” he wrote.
His drinking became so extreme that he had blackout episodes, and woke up on the floor of a restaurant bathroom with no memory of how he got there. Once “I had the first beer, I found it impossible to stop until I was completely annihilated,” he wrote.
Judge said last week he had no memory of the incident described by Kavanaugh’s accuser.
But Ford said Judge was extremely drunk, so how good is the inference that it didn't happen? It's also possible that Judge had one of his admitted episodes of alcohol-induced amnesia. You can use Judge's statement in whatever way you think is correct (and nothing stops you from using it to support the conclusion you like). On its surface it corroborates Kavanaugh's lack of memory, but it also can support an alcohol-induced amnesia theory.
If you want to go further down into this dark place, here's some more from that HuffPo article:
Judge’s book changes the name of his high school to “Loyola Prep,” and makes a glancing reference at a character he calls “Bart O’Kavanaugh.” A girl at a party, wrote Judge, asked him: “Do you know Bart O’Kavanaugh? I heard he puked in someone’s car the other night.” Judge responds: “Yeah he passed out on his way back from a party.”
In his 2005 book God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Judge slammed his high school and the “insane liberalism” of Catholicism in the 1960s. He said the school was “overrun” by gay priests — part of the church’s “lavender mafia,” he later wrote in The Daily Caller — and was infused with alcohol.
“Only a person in denial still claims that something did not go terribly wrong in the Church after the 1960s, and that more often than not that thing was homosexual priests molesting teenage boys,“Judge wrote in the The Daily Caller in 2011. “My own take is that it had less to do with homosexuality than with the feverish libertinism of the 60s. Liberals have no interest in connecting the dots from liberalism to sexual abuse.... I’m guilty as well, at least of the bouts of dehumanizing lust that is part of the fallen world and being human ... we all have that monster to some extent.”
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Posts
