All the Wrong People Trust Brett Kavanaugh
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favorite Living Canadian)
The following were questions asked of Brett Kavanaugh, nominee for a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court of the United States, by the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
What is your favorite Federalist Paper? (If Kavanaugh had answered, "Zig Zag," I'd have voted for him.)
Who among the Founders do you find the most interesting?
What have you learned from coaching girls basketball?
What makes a good judge? (At least two of them brought this fastball.)
Why does federalism matter?
Why is the First Amendment important to the American people?
Tell us about religious liberty. (These last several came rapid-fire from Tailgunner Ted Cruz.)
What did you tell your children about yesterday's hearing?
They treated Kavanaugh like he was made of delicate porcelain, and there was a reason for that, and it's not that they're all hacks in thrall to the madman in the White House-though they all are. It's because they knew Kavanaugh wasn't as slick or as quick on the draw as Neil Gorsuch was, and they also knew that he was skating on the very thin edge of perjury, just as he was in 2006, when he was confirmed to his present seat on the D.C. appeals court. (Pat Leahy, of course, clearly believes Kavanaugh skated over that line 12 years ago and, therefore, did it again when asked about it this past week.)
The point is, at the very least, arguable, and it should have occurred to the Republicans to ask about it, too. But their guts are in escrow and their balls are in a Mason jar on a shelf in the East Room.
He went to all the right schools and the well-greased conservative judicial machine got him the right career path. But Brett Kavanaugh doesn't belong on the Supreme Court any more than Roger Stone does. He was not smart enough to pull off the cutesy evasions he apparently urged on other judicial nominees when he was working in the White House during the Avignon Presidency.
He slipped and called birth control pills, "abortion-inducing drugs," which not only is unscientific, but it is the jargon of the extreme anti-choice movement. (Remember, always, that, as important as Roe is, the target ultimately is Griswold and the right to privacy. Conservatives do not believe that right exists, and was itself about birth control.) Plus, as Irin Carmon pointed out, Kavanaugh wasn't even on the short list until he mucked around with the case of a 17-year-old who wanted an abortion and did everything right even under Texas law, while Kavanaugh hemmed and hawed and tried to run out the clock.
He needed konztitooshunal skolar Mike Lee of Utah to bail him out when Kamala Harris had him treed about the machinations behind his nomination. He needed John Cornyn to try and block Cory Booker for him. He has needed unprecedented outside help to shield him from the consequences of his own political writings and career. And still-still!-he managed to lie pretty plainly about his involvement with the nomination of David Pryor to a federal appeals court seat. In 2004, Kavanaugh denied having worked on Pryor's nomination. Contemporary e-mails, leaked now out of the present Senate Judiciary Committee, clearly show otherwise.
We know why he was chosen, and it wasn't because of his academic pedigree or his clock-management skills late in the fourth quarter. It's not that anyone with a brain wouldn't trust this guy as far as they could throw John Marshall. It's that all the wrong people trust him the way you'd trust any sure thing.
I remind everyone of the most important lesson we all learned this week: Never throw an ax at a moving train, not merely because it is a stupid idea in general, but also because the ax can bounce back off the train and hit you on the head.
Ouch. From KSAT in San Antonio:
Police said the man ran down Brady Boulevard and was found by emergency medical services lying on the ground. Jeff Degraff, director of media relations for Union Pacific, said the man later told Union Pacific investigators that he was actually standing on the railroad tracks swinging the ax when he was hit by the train.
Nobody has been as dogged on the subject of pension pillaging and other, similar forms of fiscal piracy than David Sirota, who now has found a home at CapitalandMain.com. Recently, he found a story that links Chris Christie, The National Enquirer, and the White House's attempts to squash the Mueller investigation.
Under Republican governors, New Jersey and Ohio committed at least $650 million of pension cash into Chatham Asset Management, a high-risk hedge fund that has taken control of the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., which is at the center of the federal investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. California’s pension fund also has a $235 million stake in a Chatham fund. The hedge fund is run by Anthony Melchiorre, a GOP donor who reportedly met with the president and AMI CEO David Pecker at the White House soon after Trump took office. Melchiorre and his wife have donated more than $100,000 to Republican candidates and party committees since 2010. Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, recently pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws stemming from payments he made to women to hide affairs with the former reality TV star and real estate magnate. AMI executives helped Cohen purchase stories that could have hurt Trump’s presidential bid, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“I am personally appalled by the Enquirer being an accessory to Cohen’s criminal behavior on behalf of the candidate,” said Tom Bruno, a state union representative who is the chairman of the pension’s board of trustees and serves on New Jersey’s State Investment Council, which oversees the pension system’s investments. If asked to vote, I can assure you I will be voting for us to divest,” he said. “I cannot talk on behalf of the entire SIC, but I will be doing everything in my power to convince a majority to vote the same way.”
The looting of public pensions at the state level is one of the more undercover stories of our time. Sirota has been all over it for years. To paraphrase Joe Bob Briggs, Blog says check him out.
and Order, I am resolutely dubious regarding this latest addition to the franchise. First of all, even speaking as the president of the New England chapter of the Lennie Briscoe Memorial Statue Fund, and as chairman of the national Claire Kincaid Memorial Scholarship Endowment, Dick Wolf's politics always have been just a bit retrograde. (He gave Fred Thompson a platform to run for president and spout bullpucky about the right to privacy.) I don't have a lot of faith in the notion that he really believes in hate-crime laws at all, even though Jack McCoy clearly did. On the other hand, Warren Leight is the co-runner, and he's a lot less reactionary. But the show inevitably is going to become a chew-toy for the Right. I'll watch, but I'm not optimistic.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Eli's Pork Chop" (Little Sonny): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here is the U.S. Senate rejecting President Richard Nixon's nominee for the Supreme Court, G. Harrold Carswell, by a vote of 51-45. In 1948, running for the Georgia state legislature, Carswell told an audience at Mercer College: "I yield to no man, as a fellow candidate or as a fellow citizen, in the firm, vigorous belief in the principles of white supremacy." By 1970, these words were sort of a millstone around your neck if you wanted to be a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Thirteen Republicans joined 38 Democratic senators to sink Carswell's nomination. In other words, 13 Republicans thought something Carswell had said before he was nominated-in fact, decades before he was nominated-was enough to mark him lousy as a SCOTUS appointee. Just sayin'.
However, Carswell's nomination did result in one of the most famous political quotes of all time. Speaking in support of the nominee, Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska, said, "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance?" History is so cool.
The other night, kindly Doc Maddow had John Kerry on her electric teevee program to discuss our current state of affairs and to shill for his new memoir. I'd like to send some kudos her way for leading their conversation with Kerry's lonely, bold fight against the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a financial institution that pretty much was the world's laundromat for dirty money of many lands. For those of us who are Iran-Contra obsessives, and who think a lot of things went permanently wrong when that scandal largely was swept under the rug, BCCI is like catnip.
In 2004, I wrote a profile of Kerry in the magazine hereabouts. I made a point of concentrating one part of it on BCCI.
In the Senate, throughout the 1980s, Kerry made his mark spelunking down the darkest caverns of what had become a reinvigorated secret government. He chased the illicit aid to the contra rebels in Nicaragua and the byzantine operations of a bank called BCCI, a sort of international ATM for black ops. And he did so alone, as far outside in the clubby world of the Senate as he ever had been in Massachusetts. "This was a bad case of bubonic plague," says Jack Blum, Kerry's investigator through those years. One prominent Democratic senator tried to sabotage Kerry's investigations, and the Republicans, riding Ronald Reagan's popularity, went after him as harshly as the Nixon people ever did. In fact, it is a kind of unprecedented historical parlay that John Kerry's name appears both on Nixon's White House tapes and in the notebooks of Oliver North. For Kerry, the investigations were pure reform politics, but they also were leavened with a respect for what happens when people are tricked away from their investment in their government.
"It's antithetical to everything we are," he explains. "A government with secrets is accountable; a secret government is not. And when that happens, the American people are cheated of what is rightly theirs."
BCCI is why I always will admire John Kerry. Nobody wanted any part of what the bank had to hide, but he went after it anyway. But I really hope he doesn't run for president again. In addition, I am looking forward to MSNBC's Iran-Contra special on Sunday night. I fully expect to be enraged by something someone says in it.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Science Daily? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
Cretaceous Alaska could have been the thoroughfare for fauna between Western North America and Asia -- two continents that shared each other's fauna and flora in the latest stages of the Cretaceous. "This study helps support the idea that Alaska was the gateway for dinosaurs as they migrated between Asia and North America," said Dr. Kobayashi.
To support the theory, Fiorillo's international team of scientists from across the U.S., Japan and South Korea worked to establish if the tracks were those of a therizinosaur and to study any unique aspects of the ecosystem. The members -- including a sedimentologist, geologist, paleobotanist, paleoecologist and additional paleontologists including an expert on therizinosaurs -- determined that this particular area of Denali was a wet, marsh-like environment and that one fossil in particular looked like a water lily, which supported the theory that there were ponds and standing water nearby. They suspect that both therizinosaurs and hadrosaurs liked these wetter locations.
Traffic on the threes! There's a three-hadrosaur pileup on the Denali interchange. One lane open. Dinosaurs went out of their way-whole continents out of their way!-to live then in order to make us happy now.
The Committee pronounced itself disappointed that more people missed our tribute to the late Joe Strummer in our post about Anominush's op-ed in The New York Times. Therefore, it leaped at the chance to make Top Commenter Kevin Lindley our Top Commenter Of The Week:
...and an additional 15 points for The Clash reference in the penultimate sentence. London Calling!
You, my good man, are The Only Top Commenter That Matters. There are 90.11 Beckhams newly arrived into your account.
I'll be back on Monday with the latest from the Chronic Ward. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and don't throw axes at moving trains. It never works out.
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