Feinstein: Friday Is Too Soon to Vote on Kavanaugh By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dianne-feinstein-friday-too-soon-to-vote-brett-kavanaugh/

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said on Tuesday that lawmakers should not be made to vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court this week.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday that the Senate would vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation on Friday, at the conclusion of the one-week FBI investigation into the allegations of sexual assault that have been levied against the nominee by three women.

“The time for endless delay and destruction has come to a close,” McConnell said. “Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination is out of committee, we’re considering it here on the floor, and Mr. President, we’ll be voting this week.”

Feinstein, who led her Democratic colleagues in calling for the confirmation vote to be delayed pending an FBI probe, said on Tuesday that the report detailing the findings of the investigation should not be made public.“It would seem to me that if people are going to be identified, this ought to be held very close,” she said.

McConnell confirmed on Tuesday afternoon that the report will only be seen by senators and will not be made publicly available.

The White House ordered the FBI to investigate the sexual-assault allegations against Kavanaugh on Friday at the behest of Republican leadership. The FBI was initially instructed to interview just four witnesses, but the White House expanded the probe on Monday, instructing the FBI to interview any witnesses with pertinent information.

Hazmat Team Responds to Ted Cruz Campaign Office after White Powder Arrives in the Mail By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hazmat-team-responds-ted-cruz-campaign-office-after-white-powder-arrives-in-mail/

Update 2:58p.m.: The Houston Fire Department confirmed Tuesday afternoon that the substance was found to be non-toxic.

A Hazmat team was dispatched to Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign office in Houston, Texas Tuesday after staffers opened an envelope containing a white powder that may be toxic, The Weekly Standard reported.

While it remains unclear whether the material was in fact toxic, two people present at the office building were hospitalized after coming into contact with the substance, according to the Houston Fire Department.

Two people were taken to the hospital after apparently being exposed to a white powdery substance in an office building at 3200 SW Fwy. The 9th floor of the Phoenix Tower has been evacuated as HFD HazMat is responding to the scene working to determine the nature of the substance.

Fallout from the Kavanaugh Hearings: A Permanent Cloud? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/fallout-from-the-kavanaugh-hearings-a-permanent-cloud/

After the trial by fire, he could prove to be one of the most fearless, principled justices on the Court.

Conventional wisdom suggests that, if confirmed, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh forever will be “smeared” and stained by past frenzied unfounded allegations of sexual assault.

Yet the opposite just as well may be true. As a Supreme Court justice, Kavanaugh would have withstood every imaginable smear and slander and yet stayed defiant in defending his character and past, proof of both his determination and principles. His near-solitary rebuttal to his Senate accusers may suggest that Kavanaugh could prove to be among the most fearless justices on the Court.

Indeed, the only lasting effect, if any, of the serial smears lodged against him might be that in the future, as in the case of Justice Thomas, Kavanaugh would be essentially immune from progressive media attacks. What he went through likely has inoculated him from the Georgetown-party-circuit syndrome of conservative Supreme Court judges’ eventually becoming more liberal by the insidious socialization within the larger D.C. progressive media, political, and cultural landscape.

Incidentally, contrary to popular opinion, Clarence Thomas hardly remains under a permanent cloud after his ordeal. What stopped further Robert Borking for a while was the resistance and pushback of Clarence Thomas. Far from being ruined by unproven charges, he resisted the mob, got confirmed, and thereby established a precedent that innuendo, ipso facto, would not derail a nominee. For three decades, Thomas has not been regarded as suspect by most Americans but is seen as inspirational for his courage in facing down character assassination.

We have a strange standard of calibrating relative Supreme Court comportment. Thomas certainly has never said from the bench anything remotely like Justice Ginsburg’s “Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

The Perjury Farce

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/brett-kavanaugh-perjury-allegations-farce

Taking advantage of the pause forced by Jeff Flake’s change of heart last week, opponents of Brett Kavanaugh have shifted their focus from the original charge of sexual assault to the allegation that he repeatedly perjured himself before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s certainly true that Kavanaugh tried to minimize the least admirable aspects of his adolescence — understandably, given the withering fire he was under and the basic irrelevance of the matters under discussion — but there is no evidence he lied.

Much of the focus is on his drinking. There are two main lines of argument here. The first: Kavanaugh has misleadingly portrayed himself as a “squeaky clean” “choir boy,” but there is plenty of evidence that he was a heavy drinker. This begins from a false premise. Kavanaugh has said he was pious and hardworking in high school and college, but he also said in his Senate testimony that he drank excessively on occasion: “I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes others did.” Drinking in high school and college is obviously compatible with attending church or participating in community service.

The more relevant question is not whether Kavanaugh drank to excess, but whether he drank to the point of blacking out. Democrats want to establish that if he blacked out once, he may have blacked out at the alleged party with Ford and assaulted her while having no memory of it. This itself is a stretch and obviously a way to try to make up for the fact that there is no corroborating evidence of the assault.

Female Reporters #LiterallyShaking after Trump Treats Them Exactly Like Male Reporters By Megan Fox

https://pjmedia.com/trending/female-reporters-literallyshaking-after-trump-treats-them-exactly-like-male-reporters/

Feminists confuse me. On the one hand, they want us to believe that women are equal to men and in need of more fairness and equal treatment. On the other hand, the minute the president treats them just like the boys they freak out, claiming they were “bullied.” In case you’re not paying attention, “bullying” is anything that makes a leftist upset. The current weeping and gnashing of teeth are over a moment during a press conference on Nafta, when ABC White House correspondent Cecilia Vega refused to ask the president questions about the topic at hand. He refused to take her question and took a jab at her.

But which one is it, ladies? The president has been sticking it to Jim Acosta for two years. Trump is brutal to the press. It’s his thing! The rest of us find it hilarious and entertaining. It’s not like the press is respectful to him. He has just done what no other Republican president has done and gotten into the mud with the press! If they would like to be treated better, maybe they should stop writing fake news to harm his presidency.

And what’s with these girls? Are they weaker than Jim Acosta? Can’t they handle being in the Colosseum with the gladiators? If you can’t play with the boys, then get the heck out of the arena! They keep talking about respect, but did they respect the president’s wish to do trade questions first? CONTINUE AT SITE

Bring the Global Climate Action Summit Back to Earth By Tom Harris and Dr. Jay Lehr

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bring-the-global-climate-action-summit-back-to-earth/

If there was ever a time when a realistic counter to the climate scare was desperately needed, it was last month in San Francisco. Thousands of climate catastrophists invaded the city to attend the September 12-14 Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS), a massive event designed to drum up support for the Paris Agreement on climate change and to push the world to quickly end our use of fossil fuels.

In his video promoting the Summit, California Governor Jerry Brown said:

It’s up to you and it’s up to me, and tens of millions of other people to get it together to roll back the forces of carbonization and join together to combat the existential threat of climate change.

Let us be clear: Brown and his cohorts are not talking about “carbon.” They are talking about carbon dioxide (CO2) which is the opposite of pollution. Indeed, all vegetation thrives on CO2. But that honesty would not conjure up dark thoughts of soot, coal dust, and lamp black.

The “carbon” misnomer appears everywhere in climate change pronouncements. The Summit website even claimed “decarbonization of the global economy is in sight.”

Decarbonization actually means phasing out the fossil fuels that now provide over 80% of all the energy we use in favor of wind, solar, and other supposedly clean energy sources (which cannot conceivably power the world).

To contest the Summit, the Heartland Institute — labeled by The Economist magazine as “the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change” — livestreamed two panel discussions of scientists and climate policy experts meeting at the conference center of The Independent Institute in Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco.

Chaired by Heartland senior fellow James Taylor, the panel participants included Dr. Jay Lehr, Heartland’s science director; Dr. Terry L. Gannon of The Independent Institute; Dr. Richard Keen, meteorology instructor (emeritus), University of Colorado, Boulder; Miami, Florida-based hurricane meteorologist Stanley Goldenberg; and Tom Harris, Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition. CONTINUE AT SITE

Obama’s Social Experiments Are Wreaking Havoc on America Today By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obamas-social-experiments-are-wreaking-havoc-on-america-today/

Last week, Americans watched heartbreaking testimony about sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Democrats seem to be operating on the basis of “guilty until proven innocent,” believing the accuser without any corroborating evidence. This kind of sexual assault witch hunt actually began under former president Barack Obama — as did some of the other key social issues America is wrestling with today.

While the Left’s advocacy on social issues and identity politics long predated Obama, the former president’s policies supercharged many of the issues dividing America in 2018. His administration helped launch the current liberal cultural wave that wreaks havoc on American politics — and extends far beyond politics.

Here are five key ways Obama’s policies impacted American culture, beginning with #MeToo, sexual assault, and Brett Kavanaugh.
1. The sexual assault maelstrom.

It all started in 2011, when the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) under Obama’s Department of Education (DOE) issued a “Dear Colleague” letter reinterpreting Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act. The OCR letter encouraged colleges and universities to set up what Harvard law professors Jacob Gerson and Jeannie Suk called a “sex bureaucracy.”

Separate Title IX offices at colleges across the country heard sexual assault cases, doling out punishments on their own. These mini bureaucracies operated off of the false assumptions that police are biased against sexual assault victims, that 1 in 4 women on college campuses are raped, and that basic due process protections for the accused would violate the rights of the “victims.” Men who have been falsely accused — and even acquitted by real police investigations — have seen their lives and reputations destroyed.

Obama personally established the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault in 2014, and he teamed up with Joe Biden to launch the “It’s On Us” campaign on these issues.

Trump’s DOE, under Betsy DeVos, rightly reversed these practices. Even so, the idea that “innocent until proven guilty” does not apply in sexual assault cases has permeated popular culture, and reared its ugly head in the Kavanaugh confirmation battle. CONTINUE AT SITE

Mail Laced with Ricin Received at Pentagon Mail Facility By Bridget Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/mail-laced-with-ricin-received-at-pentagon-mail-facility/

Two pieces of mail intended for top Pentagon officials have tested positive for ricin and are being further analyzed by law enforcement.

“On Monday, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency detected a suspicious substance during mail screening at the Pentagon’s remote screening facility,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Rob Manning said in a statement today. “The envelopes were taken by the FBI this morning for further analysis.”

“All USPS mail received at the Pentagon mail screening facility yesterday is currently under quarantine and poses no threat to Pentagon personnel,” he added.

The mail facility is separate from the Pentagon building, ensuring the more than 20,000 employees there were never exposed to the letters.

CNN reported that the letters were addressed to Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson.

Ricin is a poison that is released from castor beans if the beans are crushed; it can also be derived from the waste products left after castor bean processing to make castor oil.

Ricin can be delivered in powder or pellet form, dissolved into liquid, or sprayed as a mist. It was used in the 1978 London assassination of Georgi Markov with a poison-tipped umbrella.

Symptoms of exposure, which differ depending on whether ricin is inhaled or ingested, to the toxin begin anywhere from four to 24 hours after exposure. Death can occur within 36 to 72 hours; there is no antidote. CONTINUE AT SITE

HIS SAY: A LEFTIST JOURNALIST ON ANTI-SEMITISM

Even hardened leftists occasionally stumble on a truth: Jonathan Saul Freedland is a leftist British journalist, who writes a weekly column for The Guardian and the New York Review of Books. His latest column bashes Kavanaugh and “the insidious force in global politics: toxic masculinity.”

On this he is right:

On the left, black people are usually allowed to define what ‘s racism; women can define sexism (and harassment); Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia. But when Jews call out something anti-Semitic, leftist non-Jews feel curiously entitled to tell Jews they’re wrong, that they are exaggerating or lying or using it as a decoy tactic-and to treat them to a long lecture on what anti-Jewish racism really is.

Jonathan Freeland (The Guardian- April 29th, 2016)

U.S. Pivots to China, With Nafta Deal in Hand White House officials say a strong North American trade deal gives them an advantage in talks with Beijing By Bob Davis

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-pivots-to-china-with-nafta-deal-in-hand-1538431208

White House officials are betting that concluding a trade deal with Mexico and Canada will give them more ammunition in their high-stakes battle with China on economic issues and national security.

A renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement, Trump advisers argue, removes the possibility that a trade war could break out on the continent and will make North America a more attractive place for investment.

When combined with U.S. tariffs against China, which boost the costs of production there, foreign companies will start moving investment out of China, the administration calculates. That would weaken China’s ability to produce next-generation technology and put additional pressure on Beijing to make trade concessions sought by the U.S.

The U.S. will “reclaim a supply chain that has been off-shored to the world,” President Trump said at a press conference Monday.

Former White House strategist Steven Bannon said the Trump strategy from the outset was to pull investment out of China and remake global supply chains, but then the effort got thrown off track when administration deputies battled over steel and other trade issues and the U.S. launched fights with Europe, Canada and other allies.

“Nafta was the key to pick the lock on the global supply chain,” he said.

Some big technology companies have said privately that they have begun weighing whether to shift some production out of China to avoid U.S. tariffs. CONTINUE AT SITE