Hillary must be laughing to herself that Kavanaugh's accuser touts passing a lie detector test

Clinton is heard laughing as she describes how she succeeded at getting her client a lighter sentence, despite suggesting she knew he was guilty.

"He took a lie-detector test! I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs," Clinton said about her client on the tapes, which were initially recorded, but never used, in the early 1980s.

The rest of the ABC News story from 2014 is here. 

Ten years after fall of Lehman, lawyer still tracking down borrowers who committed fraud

From the story in The Denver Post, here:

“What I kept seeing over and over again is how greed manifests itself,” he said. “There was an unprecedented amount of fraud.” ... People lied about their income, they lied that a home would be a primary residence, they lied about how indebted they were, they even lied about who they were, using other people’s identities to take out loans.

“It was crime on a massive scale, but nobody viewed it that way,” he said.

Banking expert Chris Whalen sums up 2008 the same way, here:

People keep asking what we think of the 10-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.  Our answer is that not much has changed.  Lehman once had the best performing bank in the US and then it was gone.  Why?  Fraud on loans and securities.

It seems our biggest problem, from the top of our society all the way on down to the bottom, is that it is shot through with liars.

Remember that next time you read a poll, or a resume.

Let God be found true, though every man be found a liar. -- Romans 3:4

Wi Gu Wong Wei: China stock markets are down big since their 2015 highs

Shanghai is down 48.7% from its 2015 high.

Hong Kong is down 6% from its 2015 high.

Meanwhile the broadest measure of US stocks, the Wilshire 5000, is up 33.6% tonight from its 2015 high. Its total stock market capitalization currently represents about $36 trillion, up about $9 trillion in the last three years.

Rush Limbaugh ends his show saying the voters are idiots . . .

. . . Sean Hannity starts his show saying they're smart enough to decide for themselves if Brett Kavanaugh stands unjustly accused.

Brett Kavanaugh's accuser might have had revenge motive for foreclosure on her parents' home

Brett Kavanaugh's mother apparently was the presiding judge in the foreclosure on the home of the parents of Kavanaugh's accuser.

Reported here.

Brett Kavanaugh's accuser has reviews by students in her classes saying she's vengeful, has something wrong with her

Story here.

Update:

Story retracted, here.

Hm. Two Christine Fords.

Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic refuses to acknowledge the facts of illegal immigrant crime

The crimes of illegal immigrants, apart from being here illegally, continue as we speak, and continuously are noted in the Twitter feeds and websites of conservatives. Of course all of that is illegitimate to the Anne Applebaums of the world. Nothing is legitimate unless it is sanctioned by coverage in the press which her side owns, and this story is not covered by her press, for political reasons. That story forms the heart of the Trump political campaign, and to give it expression is to do the work of her political enemy, which is what the essay is really all about, her political enemies, in Poland, Hungary and the United States. At one point she even solemnly informs us that "(A ruling party that has politicized its courts and suppressed the media is a party that finds it much easier to steal.)", as if that isn't a perfect description of liberal democratic rule in the United States since FDR. It's now a country where the words "illegal alien" are banned on Twitter. That's how important cheap landscapers are to The Establishment.

From the story here:

Much as Trump used birtherism and the fabricated threat of immigrant crime to motivate his core supporters, Kaczyński has used the Smolensk tragedy to galvanize his followers, and convince them not to trust the government or the media. Sometimes he has implied that the Russian government downed the plane. At other times, he has blamed the former ruling party, now the largest opposition party, for his brother’s death: “You destroyed him, you murdered him, you are scum!” he once shouted in parliament.

Dear Joe Biden: Dregs are delicious, happy to be named in their company!

Brett Kavanaugh's pal was Mark Judge

Brett Kavanaugh’s High School Friend Isn’t Helping the Nominee’s Case:

The New York Times reported that the friend the woman alleged to be in the room with Kavanaugh was conservative writer Mark Judge, who attended Georgetown Prep with the nominee. On Friday, Judge told the Weekly Standard that no such incident took place. “It’s just absolutely nuts,” he said. “I never saw Brett act that way.” ... The amount of drinking Judge describes himself undertaking [at the time] might suggest that his memory of those days may not be entirely reliable.

Barack Obama March 3, 2009: "Buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you've got a long-term perspective on it"

Here, after the 10 minute mark.

S&P 500, average nominal per annum return March 2009 - August 2018: 17.51%

Inflated death totals from Puerto Rico study not backed up by any names or cause of death

Julie Kelly, here:

There is just one little problem with the inflated death toll: There are no names of the newly-found victims or hundreds of bodies to be buried. The GWU research team reached the higher figure by comparing predicted fatalities to observed fatalities between September 2017 and February 2018. ... Also, the researchers did not specify how the nearly 3,000 people died. Lynn Goldman, the dean of the school that produced the report, confirmed the study’s limitations, telling the Washington Post, “we can come up with a hundred different hypotheses. What we don’t have is the ability today to tell you these are the factors that caused this.” The team also noted that mortality rates in low-income areas of the country were still elevated even past the study’s time frame, which could call into question the legitimacy of blaming all excess deaths on the storm.

Indirect deaths from hurricanes from 1963-2012 numbered 1,418 but Maria in Puerto Rico alone caused 2,911?

My mother died of old age related heart failure two days after Hurricane Gustav made landfall in Louisiana in 2008:

48 deaths in the state of Louisiana were blamed on Hurricane Gustav. Five were due to falling trees, two due to a tornado and the rest were indirect deaths.

My mother wasn't counted among the 41 indirect deaths in Louisiana, for the main reason that she died in a different state.

But . . .

Hurricane Fatality Reports Leave Out Thousands of Indirect Deaths, According to New Study:

Looking at 59 hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin from 1963 through 2012, the study found that those systems killed a combined 1,803 people directly – by forces like flooding and airborne debris that were caused by the storm itself. But there were also a slew of lingering impacts that proved deadly in those storms, which caused 1,418 "indirect" deaths, according to the findings. ... Nearly half of the indirect deaths attributed to these 59 hurricanes were heart attacks, according to the study's data. Automobile accidents were also a major threat to life, whether the crashes occurred during evacuation or after the storm.

So we're supposed to believe tonight that about 2,911 (2,975-64) Puerto Ricans died indirectly in consequence of one storm (Maria) over the next six months according to the new math of George Washington University and Harvard University when over the course of nearly 50 years' worth of hurricanes indirect deaths for all storms combined came to just 1,418.

Sure we are.

Looks like Hurricane Florence will fall far short of the 1944 hurricane of the same date, disappointing climate catastrophists everywhere

Beaufort, South Carolina's "Island Packet" is reporting Flo at 98 mph at this hour, just still barely a Cat 2.

Habeas corpus: Puerto Rico study showing 2,975 deaths not "a traditional death-toll accounting"

Normally one counts up the bodies, makes a list and checks it twice. But nothing in Puerto Rico is normal.

Reported here:

Researchers at George Washington University determined last month that Hurricane Maria alone resulted in 2,975 'excess deaths' in Puerto Rico. 

That finding wasn't the result of a traditional death-toll accounting, but a public health study that compared mortality in the six months following the storm with the number of deaths that would have been expected if it had not hit the island.  

'The difference between those two numbers is the estimate of excess mortality due to the hurricane,' the scientists wrote. 

G@@gl& scientist resigns due to company's compliance with China's censorship and surveillance demands

Quoted here in The Intercept:

“Due to my conviction that dissent is fundamental to functioning democracies, I am forced to resign in order to avoid contributing to, or profiting from, the erosion of protection for dissidents.”

“I view our intent to capitulate to censorship and surveillance demands in exchange for access to the Chinese market as a forfeiture of our values and governmental negotiating position across the globe,” he wrote, adding: “There is an all-too-real possibility that other nations will attempt to leverage our actions in China in order to demand our compliance with their security demands.” ...

[H]e is surprised more of the company’s employees have not quit over Dragonfly.

It's taken incompetent Puerto Rico eleven months to raise its official death toll from 64 to 2,975, just in time for the election

But in all that time incompetent Puerto Rico still hasn't made use of the millions of water bottles still sitting on a runway in Ceiba.

Possibly millions of water bottles meant for Hurricane Maria victims left on tarmac in Puerto Rico:

Puerto Rico's governor last month raised the U.S. territory's official death toll from Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975. The storm, which devastated the territory last September, is also estimated to have caused $100 billion in damage.

Flashback to the story from 2 November 2017.

Puerto Rico's water woes raise fears of health crisis six weeks after Hurricane Maria:

Bottled water can be hard to find and gets expensive, said her aunt, Maria Ortiz, 66. “If you are lucky to find some, a pack of 24 water bottles that used to be $3.99 now is about $7.50,” she said. 

They can't count, and they can't even drink.

The Hill: "Puerto Rico's government raised its official death toll which previously sat at 64"

But the culture of complaint that is Puerto Rico wasn't satisfied with the low number, so they commissioned a study to add deaths six months out from the post-hurricane period:

[A] George Washington University study commissioned by Puerto Rico's governor examin[ed] the effects of Maria in the six months following landfall in September 2017.

The long time period was used to determine the hurricane's lingering effect on deaths on the island. It compared the death rates in the post-hurricane period to other periods not affected by natural disasters.

Only in the minds of lunatics is the number of deaths from Maria 1,175 worse than from Katrina (1,800 estimated total deaths). This new methodology of liberal math is just in time for the politics of the current hurricane season, and coincides with Obama's ridiculous claim that this economic recovery is his, not Trump's.

The story is here.

Remembering the incompetence of Hillary's beloved California and FBI on 9/11

David Dayen thinks Tim Geithner's disobedience of Obama's orders fed the anger at government Trump parlayed into the presidency

Of course, this begs the question whether Obama knew what he was doing, or even wanted to know.

Here in The New Republic:

Every action fit Geithner’s worldview: The financial system must be stabilized at all costs, as the only way to heal the economy so real people benefit. “We do not need to imagine that he was in the pocket of any one bank,” Adam Tooze wrote in the new book Crashed. “It was his commitment to the system that dictated that Citigroup should not be broken up.” ...

Today, some may welcome the internal dissension in the Trump administration. But Geithner’s actions to protect banks from the president he served, and the anger it bred at a “rigged” system, diminished the public’s faith in government intervention and helped install Trump in the White House.

Who ya gonna believe, the mayor or the cops?

EXCLUSIVE: Some Jersey City Muslims did celebrate 9/11, cop and residents say:

Numerous people called police to report an exultant crowd on the roof of 2801 John F. Kennedy Blvd., a distinctive, five-story apartment building at the intersection of Sip Avenue, said retired officer Arthur Teeter, who worked in the radio room at police headquarters on Sept. 11. ... Teeter, the officer who worked in the radio room, said the address was one of several where 911 callers cited rooftop celebrations. "There were enough calls that it was disturbing," he said. "That's the only word I can use." ...

The officers, including a high-ranking official, said their reluctance to speak publicly also stemmed from concern they would run afoul of Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, who has repeatedly said celebrations did not take place. "I saw it with my own eyes," the ranking officer said. "In the end, police officers are professionals, so we just observed that stuff and sucked it up."