Thread for obviously newsworthy stuff

[Giancarlo]

Oh, and Aeson. Wait until you see Ford testify (if she does). She will have "LIAR" written straight across her face.

Coming from you, that's rich. You are the same one that believed Roy Moore and smeared the victims. You are psychotic

[Aeson]

Do you have any proof that I don't detect liars better than a polygraph?

Your incessant posting of lies you explicitly aren’t aware are lies, and claiming lies that are verifiable and often obvious facts, is ample evidence.

[Giancarlo]

So let me get this straight, you're going with Feinstein's word after she kept a sexual abuse accusation secret until the 11th hour and is now using that accusation to ruin a man's reputation and his family for political purposes?

She didn't come forward with it because the accuser was uncertain about being made public. The accuser was afraid of retaliation. The man ruined his own reputation.

You are defending Kavanaugh just like you defended Roy Moore.

By the way, the article you copy and pasted is some idiotic op/ed. Try again.

[Kidlicious]

You do realize you just thumbs upped the implication that you are useless, right?

Do you have any proof that I don't detect liars better than a polygraph?

[Aeson]

You do realize you just thumbs upped the implication that you are useless, right?

[Kidlicious]

Oh, and Aeson. Wait until you see Ford testify (if she does). She will have "LIAR" written straight across her face.

[Kidlicious]

The thing that's sad about this whole thing is that the entire process has been turned into a #MeToo referendum, ignoring the (many IMHO) disqualifying opinions and statements Kavanaugh has maintained, including a Presidency impervious to constitutional legal processes and his documented perjury before the Senate.

Democrats are smearing the nominee as a perjurer. There are three main allegations, and each is laughably frivolous.

First, critics have accused him of lying under oath when he said in Senate testimony in 2004 that he was “not involved in handling” William Pryor’s nomination to the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit because various documents indicate that he played some role in supporting Pryor’s quest for confirmation.


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To make the perjury claim, activists rip two words (“not involved”) not just out of context from his larger testimony, but out of context from the sentence itself. Some background is necessary. In the George W. Bush administration, different lawyers in the White House counsel’s office were assigned different circuits as their primary responsibility. They “handled” only nominations within that portfolio. That did not mean that they had no involvement at all with other nominations, only that those nominations weren’t their ultimate responsibility.

It turns out that Kavanaugh explained much of this to the Senate. He clearly said that he was not assigned the Pryor nomination, but he also said that he may have helped the nomination in other ways, including by attending a moot-court session. In other words, he never testified that he was not involved at all in the Pryor nomination, just that it was not his to handle.
Simply put, there is simply no credible argument that this was anything other than truthful testimony. It’s a partisan smear spread to partisan hacks who either don’t know or don’t care about the governing legal standards.

And so is the next perjury claim, that he lied about his knowledge of “memogate,” an old and largely forgotten controversy from George W. Bush’s first term. A former Republican Senate staffer, Manuel Miranda, took confidential Democratic documents from a shared server. As Above the Law founder David Lat explained in an invaluable Twitter thread, Miranda exploited a “glitch” to gain access to Democratic communications and Democratic strategies. At issue is the classic Washington question: What did Kavanaugh know, and when did he know it?

During Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony in 2004, Orrin Hatch asked him if he had received “any documents that appeared to you to have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.” Kavanaugh said no. In 2006, Ted Kennedy asked him about the same documents, and Kavanaugh issued another denial, saying, “I don’t know what the universe of memos might be, but I do know that I never received any memos, was not aware of any such memos.”

September 10, 2018 6:20 PM
Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh at his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, September 4, 2018. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)
Brett Kavanaugh acquitted himself ably in his confirmation hearings last week, which is surely one reason that Democrats have resorted to a contemptible attack on him as guilty of federal crimes.

Democrats are smearing the nominee as a perjurer. There are three main allegations, and each is laughably frivolous.

First, critics have accused him of lying under oath when he said in Senate testimony in 2004 that he was “not involved in handling” William Pryor’s nomination to the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit because various documents indicate that he played some role in supporting Pryor’s quest for confirmation.


To make the perjury claim, activists rip two words (“not involved”) not just out of context from his larger testimony, but out of context from the sentence itself. Some background is necessary. In the George W. Bush administration, different lawyers in the White House counsel’s office were assigned different circuits as their primary responsibility. They “handled” only nominations within that portfolio. That did not mean that they had no involvement at all with other nominations, only that those nominations weren’t their ultimate responsibility.

It turns out that Kavanaugh explained much of this to the Senate. He clearly said that he was not assigned the Pryor nomination, but he also said that he may have helped the nomination in other ways, including by attending a moot-court session. In other words, he never testified that he was not involved at all in the Pryor nomination, just that it was not his to handle.

Simply put, there is simply no credible argument that this was anything other than truthful testimony. It’s a partisan smear spread to partisan hacks who either don’t know or don’t care about the governing legal standards.

And so is the next perjury claim, that he lied about his knowledge of “memogate,” an old and largely forgotten controversy from George W. Bush’s first term. A former Republican Senate staffer, Manuel Miranda, took confidential Democratic documents from a shared server. As Above the Law founder David Lat explained in an invaluable Twitter thread, Miranda exploited a “glitch” to gain access to Democratic communications and Democratic strategies. At issue is the classic Washington question: What did Kavanaugh know, and when did he know it?

During Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony in 2004, Orrin Hatch asked him if he had received “any documents that appeared to you to have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.” Kavanaugh said no. In 2006, Ted Kennedy asked him about the same documents, and Kavanaugh issued another denial, saying, “I don’t know what the universe of memos might be, but I do know that I never received any memos, was not aware of any such memos.”

At the same time, however, Kavanaugh was careful to say that he might have unknowingly seen information “derived” from the memos. So, to be clear, to demonstrate perjury the Democrats would have to show clearly and unequivocally that Kavanaugh didn’t just see information taken from the memos but that he clearly and knowingly viewed the actual memos themselves.

So, what’s the evidence that Kavanaugh lied? Try not to laugh. First, and most “damaging” is an email with the subject header “spying” from an entirely different staffer — Barbara Ledeen — who claims she had “a friend who is a mole for us on the Left.”

What’s missing from that email? Any memoranda from Miranda. Indeed, there’s no communication from Miranda at all, just purported inside information from a “friend” across the aisle. Gossipy insider info is routinely exchanged in Washington, and the nature of the information in the email — regarding multi-million dollar contributions — hardly screams “secret!”

And that’s the alleged smoking gun.

As for the rest of the alleged evidence? It consists of emails that, on their face, showed no indications that they contained stolen information. And let’s go back to Kavanaugh’s key, allegedly incriminating statement. While hedging that he doesn’t know what the “universe of memos might be,” he also says, “I never received any memos.” There is not a single email or document showing that he actually received a stolen memo, much less that he did so knowingly.

The evidence of perjury is so lacking that even a panel of experts convened by Vox concluded that there was no crime. Professor Miriam Baer of Brooklyn Law School put her objection bluntly. “I don’t see any lie,” she said. She can’t see any lie because there was no lie.

So let me get this straight, you're going with Feinstein's word after she kept a sexual abuse accusation secret until the 11th hour and is now using that accusation to ruin a man's reputation and his family for political purposes?

[Kidlicious]

Kid: Lie detector tests are useless!
Kid: I am a human lie detector test.

[Giancarlo]

It has been brought up on Vox and Huffpo. I think Kavanaugh is an unethical, perverted bastard all around. I think the women coming forward was important and could lead to major political change in the midterms. Like Trump, he is a dirty piece of trash. He lied about many things... Let it all come out to roost.

[Proteus_MST]

Kid would support this

[-Jrabbit]

The thing that's sad about this whole thing is that the entire process has been turned into a #MeToo referendum, ignoring the (many IMHO) disqualifying opinions and statements Kavanaugh has maintained, including a Presidency impervious to constitutional legal processes and his documented perjury before the Senate.

[Giancarlo]

I watched it and could tell he was completely full of ****. Look at his facial expressions. This is someone who would fail a lie detector test miserably (which is widely used in federal employment, including by the CIA and State Department).

[Aeson]

I suggest anyone with any decency whatsoever watch that. He did not lie. People will believe him. I promise, in case you are a stupid liberal that can't tell when someone lies.

Kid: Lie detector tests are useless!
Kid: I am a human lie detector test.

[Uncle Sparky]

So, has Kavanaugh reached the point where he can rape a woman in Time Square, and still be appointed to the supreme court?

[Broken_Erika]

Trump says he will not consider statehood for Puerto Rico because of San Juan mayor