Bharat Rakshak

Mort Walker wrote: The Democratic party is providing political cover for various resist activities (note harassment of government officials in public) and the #MeToo movement - which has its origins in the Women's march organization from 2017. Organizations such as the pussyhat project. Their objective is to overturn a legitimate election since it was not to their liking. It is very much in line with what the self-important elite were saying that Modi never had a majority in 2014. If Trump wasn't elected in 2016, there would have never been #MeToo movement.

UlanBatori wrote:I have not got an answer to the question I asked before: What was a 15-year-old girl doing at a frat party with obvious drinking going on, with men older than herself getting themselves smashed. I know one answer but it is not PC. Instead I heard some deflection about "No is a No" etc. But heck, how do you KNOW that there was a NO? Or a YESSS? This was not like if goons stood outside and blocked someone's car and dragged her into the house, hain? This was a participant in the drunken orgy. Planned.

Republicans have disparaged the #MeToo movement as a flood of female derangement. They have argued that the sheer number of women telling their stories is evidence of a dormant, liberal hysteria come to the surface. So Ford, who had hoped to remain anonymous, wanted to make clear that she was speaking only for herself.

And yet her testimony before the Senate had an immediate effect, causing other victims of sexual violence to experience a surge of unwanted memory. In recent days, we’ve seen people share their stories on Twitter under the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport. On Wednesday, during a break in Ford’s testimony, women watching the hearing called C-SPAN to share stories live on the air. They were Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. Their narrations were vivid and jagged, evidence of Ford’s expert observation that trauma may visit the brain “episodically,” the recall more automatic than intentional. Hilary, of Pittsburgh, recounted being in college, having her drink spiked, and fighting off an aggressor. Brenda, of Valley Park, Missouri, is seventy-six years old. In tears, she spoke of being sexually molested in the second grade. The breakdown of her composure was as eloquent as Ford’s astounding poise. “You get confused, and you don’t understand it,” Brenda said. “But you never forget what happened to you.” When Ford’s time before the Senate finished, the calls to C-SPAN continued.

Going into Thursday’s hearing, many people were, with good reason, thinking of Anita Hill’s testimony about Clarence Thomas in 1991. But there’s also good reason to think of Al Franken, the former senator from Minnesota. Franken was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee until last December, when he resigned his Senate seat after several women came forward saying that he had groped them or forcibly tried to kiss them. Those stories first emerged in November, just a few weeks after the #MeToo movement began in earnest with the reporting, in The New Yorker and the Times, about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged history of sexual assault and other terrible and terrifying actions.

The Franken situation forced the Democrats to choose between the movement and a popular, and powerful, member of their party. They chose the movement, even if it has been a source of some tension within the Party since. Around the time the allegations against Franken emerged, Republicans stuck by Roy Moore, their nominee for Senate in a special election in Alabama, despite allegations of his predatory behavior toward teen-agers. Moore lost to his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones.

I very much believe in allowing people to be heard. But I am not going to be played, and I’m not going to have my intelligence insulted by the Michael Avenattis of the world. I will not be a participant in wholesale character assassination that defies credibility.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) September 26, 2018
Julie Swetnick, represented by Avenatti, said that in the 1980s, she witnessed efforts by Kavanaugh and his classmate Mark Judge to get teenage girls "inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ' gang raped' in a side room or bedroom by a 'train' of numerous boys."
Sen. @LindseyGrahamSC: “You expect me to believe that any reasonable person would go to 10 parties where people are being drugged and raped and not tell anybody about it, I don't believe it. She's on the #TheCircus@Showtime. She's been asked to come before the committee.” pic.twitter.com/zfqehXKZNk
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) September 27, 2018

WASHINGTON - The Senate Judiciary Committee has questioned two men who say they, not Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, had the disputed encounter with Christine Blasey Ford at a 1982 house party that led to sexual assault allegations.
The revelation was included in a late-night news release by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the committee. The release includes a day-by-day view of the committee's investigative work over the last two weeks since allegations surfaced targeting Kavanaugh.
Ford was the first to step forward with allegations and claimed Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, groped her and attempted to pull off her clothes while both were high school students in 1982. Since then a number of accusations have piled on, including that of a physical assault and several other sexual encounters.
The committee has interviewed two men who came forward about the disputed assault at a summer house party. Both told the committee they, not Kavanaugh, "had the encounter with Dr. Ford in 1982 that is the basis of his complaint," the release states.
The previously unknown interviews could add a new layer to the evolving saga on the eve of a possible explosive hearing between Kavanaugh and Ford, though it's unknown whether the men's claims are being taken seriously.

I love Kavanaugh’s tone. It’s nice to see a conservative man fight for his honor and his family against a 35 year old claim with ZERO evidence and lots of holes that amounts to nothing more than a political hit job by the Dems. Others in the GOP should take notice!

Sarah Sanders
‏Verified account @PressSec
1h1 hour ago
.@LindseyGrahamSC has more decency and courage than every Democrat member of the committee combined. God bless him

Bill Neely
(@BillNeelyNBC)
US Senator Klobucher, a woman, asks #BrettKavanaugh if he's ever blacked out while drinking. He says he hasn't & twice asks her, "have you?" She says she doesn't have a drinking problem. "Neither do I," he says. Surely inappropriate questions for a witness, never mind a Judge.

The Verge
(@verge)
Star Wars voice actress mocks Christine Blasey Ford’s voice during Kavanaugh testimony www.theverge.com/2018/9… pic.twitter.com/YunHam7…

Allo! This bugger is a drunken lout and rapist onlee!

The Democrats’ Missed Opportunities With Brett Kavanaugh

By Osita Nwanevu

7:37 PM
Brett Kavanaugh came into Thursday’s hearing angry and unravelling. But he’s bucked up a bit now that it’s become clear that the Democrats on the committee—appropriately empathetic during Christine Blasey Ford’s time in the hearing room—didn’t have a clue what to do with him. The Democrats were unprepared for this hearing. The list of topics they could have quizzed Kavanaugh about is long, and includes the new allegations by Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick and speculation that the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Ed Whelan may have coördinated the development of his theory of mistaken identity with Kavanaugh’s team. The Democrats elected instead to prod Kavanaugh about his drinking habits and demand—repeatedly and futilely—that he ask the White House for an F.B.I. investigation. That’s clearly not happening, and every breath spent by Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar, Richard Blumenthal, and Chris Coons on the subject was wasted. The Republicans on the committee picked up on this, and began to ask the Democrats why they didn’t simply ask Kavanaugh the questions they want the F.B.I. to probe, here and now. “So I ask my Democratic colleagues,” Mike Lee said, “if you have a question for Judge Kavanaugh, ask him! He’s right here! If that’s really what you want, the truth, ask him questions right now!” Moreover, Kavanaugh’s boisterous interruptions—however they came off on camera—were effective in interrupting the flow of questioning and flustering his interlocutors. The Democrats managed to extract a definition for “boofing” from Kavanaugh, though, so there’s that.

Elephants and Donkeys are both crooked. However, the Elephants are smarter and more effective crooks while the donkeys are clumsy.

The personal information of several Republican senators who sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee was published online in the middle of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's testimony before the panel Thursday. The information — including home addresses, phone numbers, and personal email addresses — appeared on the Wikipedia pages of Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee of Utah, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
A spokesperson for Hatch confirmed that the additions, which were quickly deleted from the Wikipedia pages, contained the lawmaker's real personal information.

"It’s shocking that someone would post Senator Hatch and other Judiciary Committee Republican’s personal information, including home addresses, putting their families in danger," said Matt Whitlock, communications director for Hatch. "That it’s happening as they ask questions in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing is just another sign of how terrible this process has gotten."
.....

According to a Twitter bot that identified the changes, the edits appeared to come from a computer on Capitol Hill, although POLITICO could not confirm that was accurate. The purpose of the edits was also unclear. White House spokesperson Raj Shah weighed in on Twitter, asking the online user responsible for the publications to "please stop."
"This is outrageous," Shah wrote.

NewsChannel 5
(@NC5)
BREAKING: Sen. Bob Corker announces he plans to vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

UlanBatori wrote:Meanwhile, more brilliance:

The personal information of several Republican senators who sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee was published online in the middle of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's testimony before the panel Thursday. The information — including home addresses, phone numbers, and personal email addresses — appeared on the Wikipedia pages of Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee of Utah, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
A spokesperson for Hatch confirmed that the additions, which were quickly deleted from the Wikipedia pages, contained the lawmaker's real personal information.

"It’s shocking that someone would post Senator Hatch and other Judiciary Committee Republican’s personal information, including home addresses, putting their families in danger," said Matt Whitlock, communications director for Hatch. "That it’s happening as they ask questions in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing is just another sign of how terrible this process has gotten."
.....

According to a Twitter bot that identified the changes, the edits appeared to come from a computer on Capitol Hill, although POLITICO could not confirm that was accurate. The purpose of the edits was also unclear. White House spokesperson Raj Shah weighed in on Twitter, asking the online user responsible for the publications to "please stop."
"This is outrageous," Shah wrote.

A_Gupta wrote:Speaking of lacking education,
https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/9/27/1 ... -kavanaugh

Roe v. Wade
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told reporters in August that Kavanaugh informed her that he considers Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, to be settled law.

Kavanaugh has not expressed outright opposition to Roe v. Wade. In 2006, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, now the Senate Democratic leader, pressed Kavanaugh on his personal opinion about Roe, but he declined to answer, saying, "I don't think it would be appropriate for me to give a personal view on that case." The exchange took place during a hearing to consider Kavanaugh's nomination to serve on the DC circuit.

{When Prof. Ford had no comment on his qualification to be a Fed. Judge, nor did Ms. Swetnick}


Kavanaugh did say, however, that if he became a judge on the circuit court, he would uphold Supreme Court precedent with respect to Roe. "If confirmed to the DC Circuit, I would follow Roe v. Wade faithfully and fully. That would be binding precedent of the court. It has been decided by the Supreme Court," he said at the time. (The Supreme Court, of course, can overturn its previous decisions.)

Because Kennedy was a swing vote in favor of abortion rights, his departure from the court has sparked alarm among abortion rights activists that Roe v. Wade could be overturned. In addition, Trump has long vowed to appoint justices who would reverse Roe and allow the states to determine whether abortion should be legal.

Abortion
One of Kavanaugh's opinions likely to draw scrutiny from senators is his dissent from a ruling of the DC Circuit last October that an undocumented immigrant teen in detention was entitled to seek an abortion.

In his dissent, Kavanaugh wrote the Supreme Court has held that "the government has permissible interests in favoring fetal life, protecting the best interests of a minor, and refraining from facilitating abortion." He wrote that the high court has "held that the government may further those interests so long as it does not impose an undue burden on a woman seeking an abortion." He said the majority opinion was "based on a constitutional principle as novel as it is wrong: a new right for unlawful immigrant minors in US government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand."

Executive branch authority
Democrats are likely to make Kavanaugh's views on presidential power a focus of the hearings. {yeah, if u're talking of POTSUS Clinton & Kennedy on best use of the WHOTUS}
In a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article, Kavanaugh wrote that "Congress might consider a law exempting a President -- while in office -- from criminal prosecution and investigation, including from questioning by criminal prosecutors or defense counsel." In the same article, however, he noted, "If the President does something dastardly, the impeachment process is available."

Kavanaugh said back in 1999 that the landmark Supreme Court opinion that ordered President Richard Nixon to turn over White House recordings toward the end of the Watergate investigation might have been "wrongly decided."
The comments were part of an interview in Washington Lawyer magazine. Reached for comment, the White House pointed to a more recent speech in which Kavanaugh praised the 1974 opinion in United States v. Nixon, which set a key precedent limiting presidential claims of executive privilege.

Agency power and government regulation
Kavanaugh has demonstrated a deep suspicion of government regulation, a pattern aligned with the Trump administration and perhaps best exemplified by his dissent in the case of a killer whale that attacked a SeaWorld trainer.

As Kavanaugh criticized a Labor Department move to sanction SeaWorld following the drowning of a trainer by the orca Tilikum, he declared that the agency had "stormed headlong into a new regulatory arena" and warned that regulators would try to impose new safety requirements on sports, the circus and more.

Overall, his view is that agencies should exercise authority as clearly spelled out in federal statutes and that judges should not, as occurred in the SeaWorld case, defer to agency interpretations that go beyond what's explicit in a law.

In opinions and speeches, Kavanaugh has questioned a ruling in a 1984 Supreme Court case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, that said judges should defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous laws. That, he said in a 2017 speech, "encourages agency aggressiveness on a large scale."

Religious liberty

Kavanaugh's opinion in a case involving a challenge under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to the Affordable Care Act's so-called contraceptive mandate, Priests for Life v. HHS, has also drawn scrutiny. In a dissent, he expressed sympathy for the religious challengers. Making reference to the Supreme Court's ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, he wrote that "the regulations substantially burden the religious organizations' exercise of religion because the regulations require the organizations to take an action contrary to their sincere religious beliefs."

In a line that has attracted some conservative criticism, however, Kavanaugh also wrote in his dissent that Supreme Court precedent "strongly suggests that the government has a compelling interest in facilitating access to contraception for the employees of these religious organizations."

Obamacare
When a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act reached Kavanaugh's Washington appeals court in 2011, he was careful not to commit and did not vote on the merits of the case.

Kavanaugh dissented from the 2-1 ruling in favor of the 2010 law known as Obamacare. He said judges had no jurisdiction at that point to resolve the merits of the dispute.

He described the law requiring people to buy health insurance as "unprecedented" and the breadth of the Obama administration's defense of it "jarring." But at the same time, Kavanaugh said judges "should be wary of upending" Congress' effort to help provide Americans with quality health care.

In 2011, Kavanaugh dissented from a majority opinion of the DC Circuit that upheld a ban that applied to semiautomatic rifles in the District of Columbia.

In his dissent, he wrote that the Supreme Court had previously "held that handguns -- the vast majority of which today are semiautomatic -- are constitutionally protected because they have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens."
Citing a previous high court ruling, Kavanaugh went on to say, "It follows from Heller's protection of semiautomatic handguns that semiautomatic rifles are also constitutionally protected and that DC's ban on them is unconstitutional."

Privacy and national security
In 2015, Kavanaugh wrote an opinion defending the US government's controversial metadata collection program, in part citing national security considerations. He wrote that the program "is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment," which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
He wrote that the program "does not capture the content of communications, but rather the time and duration of calls and the numbers called," and said it "serves a critically important special need -- preventing terrorist attacks on the United States." Kavanaugh argued "that critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program."

Net neutrality
In a 2017 dissent, Kavanaugh said he believed that Obama-era net neutrality regulations were "unlawful" and wrote that the policy violated the First Amendment.

At issue were rules approved by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015 to more strictly regulate the Internet. The rules, based on the principle of "net neutrality," were intended to provide equal opportunity for Internet speeds and access to websites. In a May 2017 order, a majority of the DC Circuit declined to review an earlier decision siding with the FCC. Under the Trump administration, the FCC has since moved to dismantle the regulation.

Kavanaugh wrote in his 2017 dissenting opinion that the regulation was consequential and "transforms the Internet." But he said the rule "impermissibly infringes on the Internet service providers' editorial discretion," and he suggested the FCC had overreached in issuing the regulation. "Congress did not clearly authorize the FCC to issue the net neutrality rule," he wrote.
This story has been updated.

CNN's Ariane de Vogue, Sunlen Serfaty and Jose Pagliery contributed to this report.

But the administration did not offer this dire forecast as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.

A_Gupta wrote:Speaking of lacking education,
https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/9/27/1 ... -kavanaugh

Mort Walker wrote: The Democratic Party is behaving like the mango man party, the difference being they have many Kejriwals.

Lalmohan wrote:

Mort Walker wrote: The Democratic Party is behaving like the mango man party, the difference being they have many Kejriwals.

for education purposes, please also provide an assessment of how you believe the republican party is behaving

Mort Walker wrote:This isn’t about rape and assault that you’ve put references to continually for people to cry and have sympathy. It is about power politics pure and simple.

eklavya wrote:

Mort Walker wrote:This isn’t about rape and assault that you’ve put references to continually for people to cry and have sympathy. It is about power politics pure and simple.

What do your female family / friends think? Do they agree with you?

eklavya wrote:UBji: what do your female family / friends think? That the professor is making this up?