October 11, 2018

Interesting display at the local grocery/big box.

We stopped by the local grocery today to pick up a few odds and ends. It is pretty much a big box store, but it treats it employees well, is not afraid to hire mentally or emotionally challenged folk, has better prices than Kroger, and isn't Wal-Mart. Oh, and has just about everything.

We were passing the book section and a hardback book caught my eye. I looked at if more closely and its title was 'The Russia Hoax' (subtitle 'The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump'). Now, there is no way that I would allow that waste of paper on my property, but I was interested to see that it was remaindered at less 1/2 price.

The reason I mention it, was because right next to it was 'Unhinged' by Omarosa, which interestingly enough well still being sold at full retail. And this is in Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati, OH.

Interesting.

October 3, 2018

I Know Brett Kavanaugh, but I Wouldn't Confirm Him (from The Atlantic)

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/why-i-wouldnt-confirm-brett-kavanaugh/571936/?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-fb-test-433-3-&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social

I Know Brett Kavanaugh, but I Wouldn’t Confirm Him
This is an article I never imagined myself writing, that I never wanted to write, that I wish I could not write.

Benjamin Wittes
Editor in chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

If I were a senator, I would not vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. These are words I write with no pleasure, but with deep sadness. Unlike many people who will read them with glee—as validating preexisting political, philosophical, or jurisprudential opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination—I have no hostility to or particular fear of conservative jurisprudence. I have a long relationship with Kavanaugh, and I have always liked him. I have admired his career on the D.C. Circuit. I have spoken warmly of him. I have published him. I have vouched publicly for his character—more than once—and taken a fair bit of heat for doing so. I have also spent a substantial portion of my adult life defending the proposition that judicial nominees are entitled to a measure of decency from the Senate and that there should be norms of civility within a process that showed Kavanaugh none even before the current allegations arose.

This is an article I never imagined myself writing, that I never wanted to write, that I wish I could not write. I am also keenly aware that rejecting Kavanaugh on the record currently before the Senate will set a dangerous precedent. The allegations against him remain unproven. They arose publicly late in the process and, by their nature, are not amenable to decisive factual rebuttal. It is a real possibility that Kavanaugh is telling the truth and that he has had his life turned upside down over a falsehood. Even assuming that Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations are entirely accurate, rejecting him on the current record could incentivize not merely other sexual-assault victims to come forward—which would be a salutary thing—but also other late-stage allegations of a non-falsifiable nature by people who are not acting in good faith. We are on a dangerous road, and the judicial confirmation wars are going to get a lot worse for our traveling down it.
...
Kavanaugh, needless to say, did not take my advice. He stayed in, and he delivered on Thursday, by way of defense, a howl of rage. He went on the attack not against Ford—for that we can be grateful—but against Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and beyond. His opening statement was an unprecedentedly partisan outburst of emotion from a would-be justice. I do not begrudge him the emotion, even the anger. He has been through a kind of hell that would leave any person gasping for air. But I cannot condone the partisanship—which was raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial—from someone who asks for public faith as a dispassionate and impartial judicial actor. His performance was wholly inconsistent with the conduct we should expect from a member of the judiciary.

Consider the judicial function as described by Kavanaugh himself at his first hearing. That Brett Kavanaugh described a “good judge [as] an umpire—a neutral and impartial arbiter who favors no litigant or policy.” That Brett Kavanaugh reminded us that “the Supreme Court must never be viewed as a partisan institution. The justices on the Supreme Court do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle. They do not caucus in separate rooms.”
...
A very different Brett Kavanaugh showed up to Thursday’s hearing. This one accused the Democratic members of the committee of a “grotesque and coordinated character assassination,” saying that they had “replaced advice and consent with search and destroy.” After rightly criticizing “the behavior of several of the Democratic members of this committee at [his] hearing a few weeks ago [as] an embarrassment,” this Brett Kavanaugh veered off into full-throated conspiracy in a fashion that made entirely clear that he knew which room he caucused in.

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Much more at link.