RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/409032-burden-on-avenatti-to-show-proof-or-face-consequences

Michael Avenatti, whose judgments have proved questionable so many times, may be right in demanding a thorough investigation of his client’s outrageous claims of multiple gang rapes participated in and witnessed by a young Brett Kavanaugh.

These claims, typical of Avenatti, seem so incredible on their face that even partisan Democratic senators have generally stayed away from them. Yet, if they are true, they are not only disqualifying for Judge Kavanaugh to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court, but they should result in criminal prosecutions of anyone and everyone who allegedly drugged young girls and subjected them to systematic gang rape on multiple occasions.

The affidavit laying out these allegations is so deeply flawed and so filled with gaps that it would be easy for any experienced cross-examiner to raise doubts about the credibility of the affiant. One critical question is why this young woman would repeatedly return to parties where she claims to have witnessed gang rapes of drugged women. Yet, since the charges are so serious, further investigation is warranted.

But there is one condition that should be imposed before an investigation is conducted: The accuser should have to waive her lawyer-client privilege with Avenatti so that investigators can determine how much of her affidavit and how many of her claims were originally her own, and how many, if any, may have been “improved upon” by her conversations with her highly partisan lawyer or others.

If she is telling the truth, she should have no reason for not waiving the privilege. If she is lying, then there is no privilege anyway, since the crime-fraud exception would take it outside of the privilege. She should be asked how she got in contact with Avenatti, who first introduced the term “gang rape” into the conversation, and whether she intended the information she conveyed to Avenatti to be made public.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/justice-for-dr-ford/

In a healthy democracy, one private unelected individual would not determine the future of the US Supreme Court. The appointment of a justice is a political decision that should be debated rationally and ultimately decided by an up down vote, reflecting the balance of political power. The current US president chose a candidate compatible with his politics.But the normal process of appointing a new justice has been jolted out of reality and thrust into a virtual time machine.

At the eleventh hour, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford accuses Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault… in 1982…when she was 15 and he was 17. And suddenly the 21 members of the Senate Judiciary committee are sucked into a grotesque debate over a hypothetical incident that cannot possibly be retrieved for scrupulous investigation. No matter how hard they peer into the crystal ball of the past, they will never find their way to a home that has no address, on a day that exists on no calendar, in the presence of witnesses that were not there.

The question is not he-said-she-said. The question is the civic duty of a responsible citizen, male or female, tempted to come forth with an accusation that would inevitably destroy the reputation of the accused. Whether true or false, an accusation of sexual assault in the age of MeToo is sure to cause irreparable damage to the accused. No due process there!

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/30/how-the

The veil separating Google’s inner workings from the outside world recently slipped again with revelations that the company discussed “tweaking” its search engine to help thwart the Trump Administration’s efforts to stem the flow of travelers into the United States from terrorism-prone countries. Adding to existing fears over the censorship of conservative ideas on Google’s platforms and elsewhere in cyberspace, this confirmation of big tech’s ideological echo chamber is only the latest in a growing array of concerns over the tech industry’s growing political power and its threats to public safety and constitutional governance. This techno-political sea change not only threatens to censor debate, it also underscores tech’s threat to privacy, the integrity of networks critical to national security, and the viability of employment in industries threatened by robotics and artificial intelligence.

These new technological changes combine to offer Republicans the chance to broaden their policy platform and make themselves the party of responsible technological regulation.

Who Will Regulate Responsibly?
When asked about where Democrats or the GOP stands on issues such as abortion, the environment, or gun control, even the most vaguely aware voters can draw from general knowledge and state where each party generally stands. Yet, the same cannot be said for problems involving software firms and social media companies. Are Democrats more committed to protecting American jobs from artificial intelligence? Does the GOP’s skepticism of government business regulation extend to companies tasked with protecting consumer information? Which party is more committed to freedom of speech online, or committed to the freedom to virtually assemble? Answers to such questions are not readily apparent because neither party has made a point of staking a claim on regulating big tech.

Voter demand for more responsibility and oversight in the tech industry is readily apparent in many recent polls. In a 2017 poll, more than 70 percent of Americans expressed fears of economic displacement and increased economic inequality caused by robotics and artificial intelligence replacing human workers. A similar survey found that majorities of voters across party affiliations support increased governmental regulation of artificial intelligence, with 73 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Republicans favoring increased oversight.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/29/jeff

Jeff Flake is an ambitious man. His ambition is to sabotage President Trump, the Republican Party, and Trump voters by any means possible.

Few Americans understand the dynamics of fake Republicans in red states, where politically aspiring liberals often put an “R” after their names and run as pretend conservatives, knowing that is their only viable path to high office. Once safely elected, they feel free, like Senator Flake, to actively and sanctimoniously betray their voters.

So it should come as no surprise The Hill newspaper in March reported that Flake has “kept in touch” with former President Obama. Flake told David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist turned CNN host, that Obama called to check on him after the junior senator announced he would not run for reelection.

Flake hates President Trump like poison. He didn’t vote for him. He’s vied with Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) for the title of senator displaying the most open contempt for the president. In his announcement from the Senate floor that he would not be running for re-election, Senator Flake thundered he would “no longer be complicit or silent” in the face of Trump’s supposed “reckless, outrageous, and undignified” behavior—behavior that includes ending the Iran deal, pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, and bringing North Korea and China to the negotiating table.

Flake is proud of his friendship with Obama, a president who repeatedly ignored the constitutional limits of his power by using his “pen and phone” to enact executive orders on immigration, environmental regulations, and international agreements that he couldn’t get Congress to pass.

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/408425-trump-should-insist-on-declassification-of-mueller-documents

It has been 16 months this week since Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller III as a special counsel to “investigate any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” as described in Mr. Rosenstein’s May 17, 2017, letter appointing the special counsel.

But that appointment letter ignored the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) special counsel regulations set forth in 28 CFR SEC. 600 et seq., and the standards and regulations published by the DOJ in the “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide” (DIOG) that require a predicate criminal offense before an investigation can be commenced.

Under the department’s guidelines, the agency is permitted “to conduct investigations to detect, obtain information about, and prevent and protect against federal crimes,” requiring some reasonable basis for commencing an investigation after having first identified “a particular crime or threatened crime.” Yet, the authorizing letter appointing the special counsel contained no “particular crime or threatened crime” by the president or his campaign, and none has been identified since, despite issuance of a later memo on Aug. 2, 2017, purporting to amplify the earlier appointment.

The president has now retracted his recent request for declassification and release of DOJ/FBI material that would shed defining light on the supposed crime (or, perhaps, lack thereof). It would be important in addition to have full, unredacted disclosure of the August 2017 Rosenstein memo to Mueller elaborating on his mission about which there should be no secrecy. But the DOJ and, now, the United Kingdom appear determined to continue to resist disclosure.

https://www.steynonline.com/8881/the-turning-point

I mentioned with Tucker the other night the condescension of Gentleman Jim Acosta, who airily presumes that, if you’re a woman, any woman, you believe the accuser and assume this Kavanaugh guy is a serial gang-rapist. That’s how it goes: Identity politics makes moron cultures of formerly sophisticated societies. So it was inevitable that when a picture from yesterday’s hearing popped up, of the judge with three females sitting behind him, the wankerati of Twitter immediately assumed that they were just three regular all-American women staring in disgust at the rape beast of Bethesda.

In fact, they were Kavanaugh’s wife, mother, and one of their dearest friends. And the reason they look like that is because they’re crushed and broken by what Dianne Feinstein, Blumenthal, Whitehouse and the other whatever-it-takes Democrats chose to do to them. It is a testament to the thoroughness with which these malign carbuncles on the body politic set about their task that, in a certain sense, one could forgive the Twitter mob its carelessness: Mrs Kavanaugh was all but unrecognizable from the woman who’d sat behind her husband just a fortnight ago. She was, indeed, a different person, and she will be for the rest of her life.

Dianne Feinstein did that to her, consciously. The Ranking Member is in a tricky position back home. She’s on the California ballot this November, but, having been outflanked on her left, she is not the official Democrat nominee. So she cannot afford to be insufficiently “progressive”, and thus concluded it was necessary to, in Kavanaugh’s words, “destroy” his family.

Nothing personal, just business. Roger L Simon writes today with cold fury:

A real rape had taken place but it wasn’t the one everyone was talking about. It was simultaneously a rape of Judge Kavanaugh, his family, and the American people themselves. The collateral damage was Dr. Ford, her friends, and her family. And the perpetrator was the Democratic Party, principally their Judiciary Committee members, their ranking member, and the minority leader.

The GOP base, and Trump supporters in particular, weren’t in the mood for the usual milquetoast pantywaist routine from Republicans. That Deputy County Attorney from Arizona seems an affable lady, but the effect of her performance, punctuated by the usual bollocks from showboating Dems about the “courage” it takes to “speak your truth” (a horrible relativist phrase), was to ensure that for the first half of yesterday’s charade the ritual sacrifice of Brett Kavanaugh was a done deal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-silverglate-on-kavanaugh-1538170255

From “Kavanaugh: A Legal Assessment—With Some Personal Reflections” by Harvey Silverglate,

When does “adolescence” occur? I’ve represented a lot of kids in trouble. And I can tell you that in the modern era, adolescence begins around age 12 and lasts through college graduation (or, for kids who don’t attend college, the age at which kids would graduate).

This is not just my opinion: Society has juvenile courts for transgressions committed in adolescence; the legal system does not want to give mere kids a permanent criminal record. Even at a time when too many juveniles are treated as adults, it is more often than not a widely accepted guiding principle that kids are given a pass by being treated and taught more than punished.

Among many of my friends in Cambridge and Boston, my view of [Brett] Kavanaugh is considered wrongheaded—if not reckless, even dangerous. So, I’ll make matters worse by saying that so much of the case being made against Kavanaugh is cynical, if not outright dishonest. It has nothing to do with his qualifications to be a Supreme Court justice. Nor is it reflective of how Kavanaugh’s most ardent critics really feel about the extent to which adults should be punished later in life for their adolescent transgressions. They would not want their own children, nor themselves for that matter, treated in the way they are campaigning for Kavanaugh to be treated. This is a classic example of the hypocrisy of the current socio-political moment.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/republicans-should-not-have-delayed-the-kavanaugh-vote/

“Maybe Republicans instructed Mitchell to refrain from asking Ford hard questions; or maybe, her experience notwithstanding, Mitchell took it on herself to conduct a gentle, confrontation-free examination. Either way, in the one and only chance they will ever have to question Ford, Republicans failed to highlight the deep flaws in her account.

Mitchell invited Ford to wax scientific about how “the etiology of PTSD is multi-factorial,” and to school Mitchell on the topography of Montgomery County. But if you were listening for basic questions about the alleged sexual assault, you listened in vain. This isn’t hard. A lawyer could have been completely respectful of Dr. Ford’s emotional distress and still have asked elementary questions:
Isn’t it a fact that you don’t know where or when this purported assault happened?
Isn’t it a fact that you can’t tell us how you got there?
You just know the house was several miles from your home, but it is a fact, is it not, that you can’t tell us how you got home?
You’ve told us that you were terrified running out of the house after the attack, but you can’t tell us who rescued you and drove you away?
You remember 36 years ago that you had exactly one beer at the party, you remember hearing your alleged attackers go downstairs, you remember exactly the route you took to get out of the house, yet you can’t tell us what happened after you left the house?

So, you’re sure the party happened, but you can’t say when it happened, you can’t say where it happened, you don’t know how you got there, you don’t know how you got home, and every person you’ve identified as a witness says that they have no memory of the party and that they never saw Brett Kavanaugh act the way you’ve described, isn’t that right?”

You have opponents whose first and only objective is delay. From the start of the confirmation proceedings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, those opponents, Senate Democrats, have thus pushed for delay. At every turn. Of course they never come out and say that’s what they’re doing — they never come out and say, “We’ve abused the confirmation process and dropped a bomb at the eleventh hour, an uncorroborated, 36-year-old allegation of sexual assault, because we’re trying to delay the vote until after the midterms.” But delay is what they want.

It doesn’t matter what sheep’s clothing the wolf comes in; the wolf is always delay. When they say, “We’re protecting survivors,” they mean, “We want delay.” When they posture that “women must be believed,” their aim is more delay. When they say, “The FBI must investigate to remove any cloud over the nominee,” the translation is: “Give us a delay so we can come up with new reasons for delay.”

Get it?

Dems say, “potato,” they mean “delay”;
Dems say “tomato,” they mean delay;
Tomato, delay, potato, delay;
Let’s call the whole thing off.

So, finally, we get to a committee vote over two weeks after it should have happened; after reopening a hearing that involved 31 hours of testimony from the nominee; after 65 meetings with senators and followed by over 1,200 answers to post-hearing questions, more than the combined number of post-hearing questions in the history of Supreme Court nominations. We finally get Kavanaugh’s nomination voted out of committee. And then, as a final floor vote is about to be scheduled and debated, Republicans — taking their lead from the ineffable Jeff Flake — agree to accede to one more Democratic request (really, just one more, cross-our-hearts . . .). And what would that be?

What else? Another week of delay.

The rationale for this delay is priceless: We need an FBI investigation. It is understandable that the public does not realize how specious this demand is. But who would have thought Senate Republicans were in need of a civics lesson?

Let’s try to give them a brisk one.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/28/revenge-of-the-

In one scene in “When Harry Met Sally,” Meg Ryan’s character insists she had great sex in college with a guy named Shel. Billy Crystal’s character doesn’t buy it.

“Sheldon? No, no, you did not have great sex with Sheldon. A Sheldon can do your income taxes, if you need a root canal, Sheldon’s your man . . . but humpin’ and pumpin’ is not Sheldon’s strong suit. It’s the name. ‘Do it to me Sheldon, you’re an animal Sheldon, ride me big Shel-don.’ Doesn’t work.”

Since we all reliving the 1980s, that clip came to mind as I watched Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) grill Judge Brett Kavanaugh on Thursday about his high school hijinx and in-crowd jargon from Georgetown Prep’s 1983 yearbook. The former prosecutor applied his keen interrogation skills against the Supreme Court nominee as Whitehouse delved into an unfamiliar world of teenaged popularity and partying, a place where guys like Kavanaugh strode past the likes of Whitehouse in the high school hallway with nary a glance, and Kavanaugh’s gal pals never gave poor Shel a chance to score.

Whitehouse revealed depravity of the highest order as he exposed the elite prep-school caste system. He finally was clued into its secret dialect and, acting like he was uncovering the cool kids’ Rosetta Stone, he made Kavanaugh admit that “ralph” is a reference to vomiting, and “boofed” means flatulence. The judge finally explained to an anxious nation what all those Fs were before his mention of the FFFFFFFourth of July. (Poor Squi.)

Whitehouse even exposed how these campus kings entertained themselves on the weekend while he was at home sharpening his Dungeons and Dragons skills. In one riveting exchange, peering over his glasses, the two-term senator cross-examined the former star athlete and student:

Whitehouse: Devil’s Triangle?

Kavanaugh: Drinking game.

Whitehouse: How’s it played?