kiddie diddling?

i've heard these vague accusations that graham has some shit in his closet (beyond just being gay) and is maybe being blackmailed. anyone want to throw a little light on this for a non-US guy?

more likely, Trump told him he would be attorney general and his eyes rolled into the back of his head

Nothing hypocritical here, no sirree.

Exactly. I can never take J. Edgar Graham's theatrics seriously because he so publicly salivates for personal power.

He still thinks he’s the one on the Mormon prophecy.

You have to consider the cost of lying for both parties involved when reasoning about who you think is the party telling the truth.

What does Ford have to gain and lose from lying?

What does Kavanaugh have to gain and lose from lying?

What happens if either is found to be lying? What is the recourse and who has it worse if caught in a lie?

Presumption of innocence is for criminal court trials, not Supreme Court hearings.

If anything, a hearing for a lifetime appointment like this one, where you have major power over people's lives, SHOULD work on presumption of guilt. It's such an extraordinary position that an extraordinary standard needs to be applied. The committee should begin with the assumption that the nominee isn't worthy of the post and expect them to convince them otherwise. Any allegations like this would be disqualifying unless disproven beyond a shadow of a doubt. There's too much at stake for it to be approached differently.

If people think that standard is unreasonable, then they should support doing away with the ridiculous notion of lifetime appointments. Have each justice serve for, say, a decade or so, then they get replaced. Stagger it so each president gets the same number of justices to appoint (barring an unexpected death.)

But that won’t work either because conservatives have figured out that controlling and manipulating the Supreme Court is the fastest way for them to turn the country into their ideal vision of a religious free capitalist cleptocracy. The only conservative judges that make it up the judicial food chain are the ones that share the same ideals of supreme corporate/oligarch rule and freedom of Christian bigotry.

There will never again be a moderate conservative nomination to SCOTUS, so any time they end up a majority on the court you will get massively regressive rulings and attempts to undo things like row v wade

Basically it all boils down to the country no longer being a representative democracy but a farcical dog and pony show orchestrated by the 1%.

It’s how your congressmen can be total jackasses for their whole careers, get nothing of value for normal people accomplished and still get a quarter billion in campaign bribes every election to keep them in office.

It boils down to enough of the electorate being lazy idiots, the over representation that most red states get, and the fact that presidential elections are now determined by a few districts in 3 states.

This.

I can't for the life of me figure out why Democrats are allowing the Republicans to get away with using the language of a criminal trial. If we allow the R's to pretend that this is a criminal trial, then it makes sense to confirm Kavenaugh.... especially since R senators are actively preventing people from gathering evidence. But it's *not* a criminal trial. He's just a job candidate. And he's a lousy one at that.

Are you suggesting Kavanaugh not getting onto the Supreme Court ruins his life?

Well, 3 persons accusations, and also his apparent lying (under oath) about not getting shitface drunk while people that knew him have said otherwise.

So you're not just a braindead "both parties are the same, hilldawg = WW3 over syria" idiot, you're a republican shitstain shill, just like all libertarians.

Frankly, as awful as it might have been, I think two reasonable people can disagree about whether what the guy might have done thirty-five years ago should keep him off the court. I was a pretty shitty teenager, too, for a while there. It may or may not represent who he is now, and it's no longer prosecutable in any court anyway.

Quite frankly, the fact that Kavanaugh lost his cool in a big way and was was incredibly disrespectful to the senators questioning him make him a less viable candidate. The job he's auditioning for demands at least the sheen of impartiality, and he may have blown that already. That, and I'd like to hear more about what his drinking is like these days. Dude has an Irish last name, ya know, and, much as I love the guy, I've got a frequently drunk Irish dad.

When people don’t face consequences for their actions and do not show remorse over them, I reserve the right to decide that they haven’t changed and are still the same shitty person.

Kavanaugh has recent judicial history showing that he’s a callous prick and that leads me to believe that deep down he’s still the entitled private school rich kid of long ago.

He's arguing for his innocence, so we're not going to hear an apology, but the rest of all that sounds all right, really.

And did he really claim that he was a virgin until he graduated college? I lost my virginity comparatively late, but that sounds unbelievable and maybe that should keep him from the Supreme Court even if it's true. Mel Brooks said that presidents, when they don't do it to their wives, do it to the country.

The most blatant lies seem to be about the yearbook entries. If more people from his school get interviewed, it'll become clear that absolutely zero people thought "boofing" was anything other than anal sex, "devil's triangle" anything but a threesome, and that "aluminius of Renate" meant anything but that she was a slut (especially with the context of a poem about how she was a slut written elsewhere).

I can't imagine a job interview context where I'd hire somebody who had such an easy time with small inconsequential lies. I don't think the rape issue will ever get 100% proven one way or the other, but the many casual lies under oath should really be disqualifying. It seems like these lies are finally filtering into major news stories. I think these are the real reason the American Bar Association asked for an FBI investigation. They know he's a a casual liar and it looks real bad for them.