Kavanaugh SCOTUS hearings

[GMDino]

(09-18-2018, 11:02 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Sure he is, which is why the Dems have been all over him about it and it's been a huge news story.

If you're basing the validity of based on the level of news coverage you're wrong. (Hard to believe that!)  We all know sex sells and this accusation is bigger "news".

The Democrats did bring it up and ask for someone to look more into it.

[GMDino]

(09-18-2018, 10:59 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Sure, to a point.  An even better question here is "is it provable"?  Right now you have the accuser's version against Kavanaugh and his friend's word.  How do you prove an allegation from 35 years ago?  If there is no "proof" other than the accuser's word then I don't see how anyone could logically hold Kavanaugh to account for it.  Every Dem will, using #metoo as a political weapon, but should a logical, fair minded person judge anyone guilty based on a 35 year old accusation with no corroboration?


Exactly how will you know if that occurs?  Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the accuser's story is 100% true.  By her own account Kavanaugh was "staggering drunk".  he could truthfully say he has no memory of it ever happening even if it did.  Which leads us back to the original question, how are you even going to determine if the story is true?


Thank you for being the first person to acknowledge that Feinstein's actions were both calculated and purely political.


I largely agree with your points.  As to Kavanaugh's truthfulness, being evasive, or rather non-committal is rather par for the course in today's political atmosphere.  

I agree that it would virtually impossible to "prove".  Even if true, even if Kavanaugh remembers every second of it he'd certainly never admit it.  So short of dna evidence it is not something that can be proven 100%

Absolutely.


But, uh, we had proof of Trump saying he likes to grab women by their privates and he can get away with it because he's famous and that he aggressively pushes himself on any women he finds attractive...but that was ignored as "locker room talk".  

We have proof that he lies, unequivocally lies, and his supporters just shrug it off as "every politician does it".


So even with "proof" one side of the aisle will simply ignore it anyway.

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(09-18-2018, 11:04 AM)GMDino Wrote: If you're basing the validity of based on the level of news coverage you're wrong. (Hard to believe that!)  We all know sex sells and this accusation is bigger "news".

The Democrats did bring it up and ask for someone to look more into it.

Uh no, sorry that's not how it works.  If the Dems had proof that Kavanaugh perjured himself they'd be screaming bloody murder about it.  The fact that they aren't means they don't and neither do you.

(09-18-2018, 11:11 AM)GMDino Wrote: I agree that it would virtually impossible to "prove".  Even if true, even if Kavanaugh remembers every second of it he'd certainly never admit it.  So short of dna evidence it is not something that can be proven 100%

Absolutely.

It can't even be proven by a preponderance of the evidence, or 50.01%.  At least not with the "evidence" we have now.

Quote:But, uh, we had proof of Trump saying he likes to grab women by their privates and he can get away with it because he's famous and that he aggressively pushes himself on any women he finds attractive...but that was ignored as "locker room talk".  

Irrelevant.

Quote:We have proof that he lies, unequivocally lies, and his supporters just shrug it off as "every politician does it".

No, you don't.

Quote:So even with "proof" one side of the aisle will simply ignore it anyway.

Ironically, even without proof one side of the aisle will believe it anyway.

[GMDino]

(09-18-2018, 11:17 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Uh no, sorry that's not how it works.  If the Dems had proof that Kavanaugh perjured himself they'd be screaming bloody murder about it.  The fact that they aren't means they don't and neither do you.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/brett-kavanaugh-misled-the-senate-under-oath-i-cannot-support-his-nomination/2018/09/13/ea75c740-b77d-11e8-b79f-f6e31e555258_story.html?utm_term=.535ffcb97159

https://twitter.com/SenatorLeahy/status/1037753403856887808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1037753403856887808&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fnewrepublic.com%2Farticle%2F151095%2Fbrett-kavanaugh-really-lie-congress

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5FaLqXy1-0

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-lied-least-4-times-oath-confirmation-hearings/

(09-18-2018, 11:17 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: It can't even be proven by a preponderance of the evidence, or 50.01%.  At least not with the "evidence" we have now.

Water is wet, the sky is blue, SSF had to refine my answer rather just agree when I agreed with him.

(09-18-2018, 11:17 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Irrelevant.

Not one bit. there was proof that was completely ignored.

(09-18-2018, 11:17 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: No, you don't.

https://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/statements/byruling/false/

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/04/13/trumps-lies-corrode-democracy/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/opinion/ct-ptb-marcus-column-st-0731-story.html

http://time.com/5084420/donald-trump-lies-claims-fact-checks/

(09-18-2018, 11:17 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Ironically, even without proof one side of the aisle will believe it anyway.

I agree with that. Proof though should be strongly considered over political party.

[BmorePat87]

(09-18-2018, 10:59 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Sure, to a point.  An even better question here is "is it provable"?  Right now you have the accuser's version against Kavanaugh and his friend's word.  How do you prove an allegation from 35 years ago?  If there is no "proof" other than the accuser's word then I don't see how anyone could logically hold Kavanaugh to account for it.  Every Dem will, using #metoo as a political weapon, but should a logical, fair minded person judge anyone guilty based on a 35 year old accusation with no corroboration?

Certainly cannot be proven at this point in time, which is why I phrased my responses to note my own personal doubt or belief. I would suggest that bringing this up years ago certainly provides some slight degree of corroboration, however small, but, as I said, I have doubts since there was no name given. 

[Belsnickel]

(09-18-2018, 10:59 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: But it absolutely is.  You're merely arguing degrees of severity while completely acknowledging my core point.  We're also discussing a completely unprovable allegation.  In any event, your view of the juvenile justice system is a bit outdated, at least by CA standards.  Record sealing is the norm for all juvenile offenses that successfully complete probation and the concept of pre-booking diversion has taken root with the aim at preventing juvenile offenders from even having an arrest record.

Unprovable, or unable to stand up to the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard? This isn't a criminal hearing. Preponderance is enough for me, especially because I still disagree that this can really be equated to the juvenile justice system.

We have therapist notes, we have the polygraph, we have the husband's attestation. Right now all we have is Kavanaugh saying it didn't happen on his side. That is preponderance to me.

[Belsnickel]

(09-18-2018, 11:37 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote: Certainly cannot be proven at this point in time, which is why I phrased my responses to note my own personal doubt or belief. I would suggest that bringing this up years ago certainly provides some slight degree of corroboration, however small, but, as I said, I have doubts since there was no name given. 

According to some reporting, the husband claims the name was said, but it was not written down by the therapist.

It's also of note that the other man that is said to have been in the room at the time has gone with the "I do not recall" response instead of a denial when asked about it.

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(09-18-2018, 11:48 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Unprovable, or unable to stand up to the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard? This isn't a criminal hearing. Preponderance is enough for me, especially because I still disagree that this can really be equated to the juvenile justice system.

We have therapist notes, we have the polygraph, we have the husband's attestation. Right now all we have is Kavanaugh saying it didn't happen on his side. That is preponderance to me.

Then I hope you never sit on a civil jury.  Also, it isn't just Kavanuagh who said it didn't happen, Judge said so as well.

[jj22]

Judge Kavanaugh denied a 17-year-old immigrant an abortion, said decisions you make as a 17 year old should have lifelong consequences. Hmmm OK! Case made!

[*bfine32*]

(09-18-2018, 11:58 AM)jj22 Wrote: Judge Kavanaugh denied a 17-year-old immigrant an abortion, said decisions you make as a 17 year old should have lifelong consequences. Hmmm OK! Case made!

Wasn't he actually saying a juvenile can not be held to make these decisions? Case suddenly unmade! 

[GMDino]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/09/17/what-the-man-accused-of-helping-kavanaugh-assault-a-woman-wrote-about-female-sexuality/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.97c922039e1a

Quote:What the man accused of being part of Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault had to say about women’s sexuality




From Mark Judge’s yearbook page. (The Cupola 1983)

A quote from a playwright runs alongside the family photos on Mark Judge’s page in his high school yearbook: “Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.”

Judge’s yearbook entry appears one page before the bio of his classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, federal judge and Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. Both men graduated in 1983 — a year after they allegedly locked a girl inside a bedroom at a house party, where she says a drunken Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and tried to strip her while a similarly drunken Judge watched and laughed.

Both men have denied the accusation, which Christine Blasey Ford went public with this week in The Washington Post. Judge told the New York Times that not only did he never see a sexual assault, but that such behavior would be wildly out of character for the Catholic-raised-and-educated boys who went to Georgetown Prep in the early ’80s.

What Judge has written in his career as a journalist and author is another matter.


In two memoirs, Judge depicted his high school as a nest of debauchery where students attended “masturbation class,” “lusted after girls” from nearby Catholic schools and drank themselves into stupors at parties. He has since renounced that lifestyle and refashioned himself as a conservative moralist — albeit one who has written about “the wonderful beauty of uncontrollable male passion.”


Judge credits Georgetown Prep as the place he learned to write, even as he blames it for sending him down the path to alcoholism and immorality.


He was caption editor for his yearbook, which included lines like “Ebony and Ivory” beneath a photo of a white and a black student, and “Do these guys beat their wives?” beneath a group photo of several boys.


In his 2005 memoir, “God and Man at Georgetown Prep,” he wrote that he co-published the school’s underground student newspaper in his senior year, dedicating it largely to documenting the school’s party scene. 


One issue pictured a music teacher at a bachelor party “chugging a beer, surrounded by a group of us with raised mugs, sitting down while being entertained by the stripper.”


Judge never wrote about any sexual violence at those parties, nor did he mention Kavanaugh attending any. But Judge’s 1997 memoir, “Wasted,” references a “Bart O’Kavanaugh” character who passes out drunk and throws up in a car.


In Judge’s telling, it took him years to realize the error of his high school ways. He eventually got sober, rediscovered Catholicism and briefly took a teaching job at Georgetown University.


Academia didn’t suit Judge, apparently. He left the school in the mid-90s and wrote his first column for the Weekly Standard about his experience there:


“I saw course descriptions requiring students to read comic books and watch the feminist film Thelma and Louise,” he wrote, “and academic papers proclaiming that all courses not named ‘Women’s Studies’ or ‘African-American (or other) Studies’ are ‘men’s studies . . . white-defined, ethnocentric, and implicitly racist.’ ”


Judge has written dozens of columns in the decades since, including several for this newspaper. Femininity, masculinity and sexuality are perennial themes. He has written that disposable razors are too feminine, that former president Barack Obama is practically a woman, and that gay men have infiltrated the priesthood.

He has also written repeatedly about his thoughts on sexual violence, which might make him an interesting character witness if Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh result in a prolonged public investigation.


In general, Judge has been unsparing of men accused of assault, including the conservative Senate candidate Roy Moore, and his condemnation of male aggression sometimes bleeds into critiques on women’s behavior, as when he wrote last year for Acculturated:

Quote:“There’s never any excuse to rape, a crime that I think is almost akin to murder because the rapist kills a part of the human soul. And yet what women wear and their body language also send signals about their sexuality.”

Two years earlier, in an ode to “sexy” pulp novels, Judge lamented “social justice warriors” who confuse rape with innocent demonstrations of masculinity. He wrote then of “an ambiguous middle ground, where the woman seems interested and indicates, whether verbally or not, that the man needs to prove himself to her.”



“If that man is any kind of man, he’ll allow himself to feel the awesome power, the wonderful beauty, of uncontrollable male passion,” Judge continued. To illustrate his point, he linked to a scene from the 1981 film 
“Body Heat,” in which the hero forcibly breaks into a woman’s home and is rewarded with a kiss.

https://heavy.com/news/2018/09/mark-judge-brett-kavanaugh-classmate/

Quote:Mark Judge, a writer who has penned articles about Catholic sex abuse controversies and for conservative and other publications, revealed in an interview with the Weekly Standard that he is the high school classmate of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh who was named in a mysterious letter sent to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office.

The controversial letter alleged sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh in high school (according to The New Yorker), which Kavanaugh has strenuously denied. In the interview with Weekly Standard, Judge also strongly denied the accusations. According to Weekly Standard’s John McCormack, who authored the article, Mark Judge is a writer in Washington D.C.


“It’s just absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way,” Judge told the Weekly Standard of the Kavanaugh accusations.


The woman who accused Kavanaugh and who sent the letter to Dianne Feinstein has now allowed The Washington Post to publish her name: Christine Blasey Ford, a Palo Alto University professor. She accuses Kavanaugh of pinning her to a bed and groping her. The Post alleged: “Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling.”


Judge revealed on Facebook September 9, 2018 that he was receiving inquiries from editors about “high school and the 80s.” He’s written in the past about beer-fueled parties in the 1980s, about alcoholism, and has been sharply critical of Barack and Michelle Obama – along with many other topics. He also wrote on Facebook that he kept a diary from the 1980s.

Mark Judge has now deleted or privatized his Facebook posts. However, you can see screenshots from some of them later in this article.




...


On Facebook, Mark Judge has shared some information about Brett Kavanaugh. “He had the same haircut on the night I met him (at Beach Week) in 1981. I mean, the exact same haircut,” he wrote in July 2018, with a share of a New York Times story that declared that Kavanaugh’s law students had praised Kavanaugh as a law professor, including saying nice things about his hair.



Judge recently shared an article by another author at the conservative site Hot Air that was headlined “Please, For the Love of God Let This Be the Last Supreme Court Nomination Hearing.” The article criticizes Democrats’ handling of the Kavanaugh nomination process.



A biography page shows that Mark Judge has himself written articles for the conservative publication The American Spectator (among many other places that his work has appeared.)



A 2009 article by him on American Spectator’s website starts, “The decline of the mainstream media is not only a matter of liberal bias, but of linguistics. The dinosaur media is losing readers because it is full of bad writers.”



On September 5, he shared this article which ran on the Liberty Magazine website with a Mark Judge byline about a beer-fueled 1985 party, writing on Facebook, “Just got a bit of a jolt from a high school buddy who just called me. This is (mostly) fiction, bro. Nothing to worry about.” The article uses the header “1985” and quotes a friend called Chris as saying of a woman, “She can only have an orgasm with a Republican” among other things.


‌

The article then quotes Chris as saying, “I bet she’s got a great p****. Just a sweet, tasty, real woman lady p****. A Hollywood p****. A cosmic girl p****.”



The article describes a scene at the third week of “beach week,” saying, “We had a ‘T & A’ party and invited the girls from Trinity and St. Anne’s. We’d lie about having a serious chaperone, and they would then lie to their chaperones about it…Chris and I did a line of cocaine in the car.” It describes discussions about hookers and females’ attributes. “We talk and drank, and the party got louder and wilder. People paired off, Mueller and Walsh were wrestling with each other in a fight over the music, and a bottle got broken,” it continues.



On September 2, 2018, Judge shared the same article and wrote “based on a true story.” You can see that screenshot at the top of this fact section. Judge has since privatized or deleted it.



A previous version contains the byline Hartley Kane.



There is also a YouTube page with the name and photo of Judge that posted a video he has now removed.

[GMDino]

(09-18-2018, 11:54 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Then I hope you never sit on a civil jury.  Also, it isn't just Kavanuagh who said it didn't happen, Judge said so as well.

Good lord man!  I'd rather have a person willing to think and consider than someone who "knows people" from all their "experience"!  

[*bfine32*]

(09-18-2018, 12:10 PM)GMDino Wrote: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/09/17/what-the-man-accused-of-helping-kavanaugh-assault-a-woman-wrote-about-female-sexuality/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.97c922039e1a




https://heavy.com/news/2018/09/mark-judge-brett-kavanaugh-classmate/

I can only assume this Judge guy would have a hard time getting confirmed if ever nominated.

[GMDino]

(09-18-2018, 12:15 PM)bfine32 Wrote: I can only assume this Judge guy would have a hard time getting confirmed if ever nominated.

But he'll make a fine character witness.  

[Belsnickel]

(09-18-2018, 11:54 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Then I hope you never sit on a civil jury.  Also, it isn't just Kavanuagh who said it didn't happen, Judge said so as well.

I'd still say we're at 50.01% on Ford's side with that. I have sat on a civil jury, and adjudicate cases using preponderance in other scenarios on a regular basis including one upheld in federal court. If the evidence points to a "more likely than not" situation, then it passes preponderance. Based upon the evidence right now, we're there.

It should also be noted that the concerns over this haven't been about his conduct at the time, it's been more about his response and how honest he has been.

[*bfine32*]

(09-18-2018, 12:41 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I'd still say we're at 50.01% on Ford's side with that. I have sat on a civil jury, and adjudicate cases using preponderance in other scenarios on a regular basis including one upheld in federal court. If the evidence points to a "more likely than not" situation, then it passes preponderance. Based upon the evidence right now, we're there.

It should also be noted that the concerns over this haven't been about his conduct at the time, it's been more about his response and how honest he has been.

So there is no presumption of innocence in this standard?

[BmorePat87]

(09-18-2018, 01:07 PM)bfine32 Wrote: So there is no presumption of innocence in this standard?

In a civil case they'd be assessing responsibility not guilt and the standard is preponderance of evidence. 

[*bfine32*]

(09-18-2018, 01:13 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: In a civil case they'd be assessing responsibility not guilt and the standard is preponderance of evidence. 

In most case, a few use the clear and convincing standard. So in this case they would be assessing if Kavanagh was responsible for her assault, instead of Guilty of it? Seems unusual. This just seems like the type of case that innocence should be presumed.

[Belsnickel]

(09-18-2018, 01:07 PM)bfine32 Wrote: So there is no presumption of innocence in this standard?

There is, that is why anything 50% or lower is a lack of responsibility. Anything above 50% is responsible.

[GMDino]

(09-18-2018, 10:59 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the accuser's story is 100% true.  By her own account Kavanaugh was "staggering drunk".  he could truthfully say he has no memory of it ever happening even if it did.  Which leads us back to the original question, how are you even going to determine if the story is true?

I had to requote this paragraph after reading this tweet:

"She was drunk, this rape is her fault."

"He was drunk, this rape isn't his fault.

— Chloe Angyal (@ChloeAngyal) September 18, 2018