Beto O'Rourke detonates suicide vest in race against Ted Cruz, claims he didn't leave scene of accident while drunk

Laugh of the Day: Four people claiming I told them last year that I went to the moon proves I did

Byron York thinks Feinstein call to postpone Thursday's hearings designed to give cover to Ford to back out

Here:

Are the new protests a prelude to Ford rejecting yet another hearing date? That's not yet clear. But if she does, she'll have the support of Senate Democrats. 


Dianne Feinstein calls for immediate postponement of Kavanaugh confirmation after second accuser emerges

Feinstein does not know if Ford will testify

The Rush Limbaugh lie of the day: "Drain the swamp" is why Trump was sent to Washington

"Drain the swamp" was a late development in the campaign, courtesy of the libertarian Steve Bannon and former Cruz campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, also a libertarian. Arguably if Trump had dropped that rhetoric and pretended to make nice with the Establishment after he'd won we'd see far more of the things Trump ran on accomplished by now than we do.

Trump distinguished himself from every other candidate in the primaries by making the border with Mexico the central issue from the time he walked down that elevator until mid-August 2016, which, when solved, would help to solve many other problems, like drugs, disease, and crime. After Bannon and Conway came on board replacing Manafort, however, that message began to be played down, to the point that Trump's campaign nearly cratered in the Arizona town hall in late August with Sean Hannity when Trump wavered badly on the issue, polling the crowd for its opinion. That was not the same man we had been seeing for an entire year.

Rush Limbaugh is also a libertarian, and characteristically doesn't give a damn about the border. He never has. He just licked his finger and checked the wind in his support of border security under Trump. But illegal immigration was never on Rush's radar, just as it wasn't on Ted Cruz' either. Rush was for that dual citizen, remember?

Here is Rush today, still trying to co-opt the Trump base:

That’s why at every Trump rally, what is the No. 1 sign they see, outside of Make America Great? What’s the number one sign you see at a Trump rally, Mr. Snerdley? (interruption) Nope. “Drain the swamp.” “Drain the swamp” is the No. 1. “Build the wall,” No. 2. (“Lock her up” is really a chant.) But “drain the swamp” is why Trump was sent there, and declassifying these documents would be a giant step for mankind in draining the swamp. 

Wikipedia gets some things right:

In the final month of his campaign, Donald Trump used the phrase "drain the swamp" in his rallies, pledging his supporters to "make our government honest once again." Trump said he originally "hated" the phrase, but when people reacted positively to it, he began "saying it like I meant it".

Loan growth is flat, not booming

If your entire political party is based on the right to murder the unborn what's a little philandering, femicide and rape among friends?

False accusations of rape occur at rates 2 to 6 times higher than for other false accusations, over 40% of accusations recanted

From SEX, LIES, AND RAPE:

It is a primary tenet of “feminist jurisprudence” that women never lie when complaining of sexual abuse. This delusion is as ludicrous as the notion that all women think alike.

Any man who states the obvious, however, puts his career at risk. Even liberal Law Professor Alan Dershowitz was accused of sexual harassment just for discussing in class the possibility of false rape allegations. In 1993 Dershowitz told author David Horowitz that he began videotaping classroom lectures on the subject for his own protection, and that other experts in the field stopped teaching rape law rather than take the risk.

According to a report of the Defense Department Inspector General released in 2005, approximately 73% of women and 72% of men at the military service academies believe that false accusations of sexual assault are a problem. But military officials keep pretending that the problem does not exist. 

Kooky Macro Tourist has his promoters

Chuck Grassley has finally broken his long silence on why there hasn't been a Kavanaugh vote yet to update us on how the corn grows

Rush Limbaugh just read the riot act to Chuck Grassley, telling him Republicans had better vote on Kavanaugh

Good! But I doubt Chuck is listening. He's been asleep since September 21st.

Kooky "Macro Tourist" tells us to put aside our political views, uses crabbed Talking Points Memo graph to warn us about Republican federal spending increases

THINGS HAVE CHANGED...:

Although the Republicans are supposedly the party of fiscal conservatism, we all know that sort of talk is only for when they are not in power. ... There should be little surprise that under Republican stewardship, the greatest fiscal stimulus in the past decade has been instituted. Not saying if it is good or bad because my opinion is completely irrelevant. ... You would be foolish to ignore the dramatic change in the world’s attitude towards economic policy. “Tight fiscal and easy monetary policy” is being replaced with “easy fiscal and (somewhat) tighter monetary policy”. And ironically enough, the Republican Party under Trump’s “leadership” is at the forefront of this change.

Apparently the guy can't figure out the facts for himself, which show that Trump is projected by the center left Tax Policy Center to be in the same league as Obama through fiscal 2020, not in the Reagan league, not in the Nixon league, not in the Bush 41 league, either. Hell, he's not even projected to make the Bush 43 league, which was bad enough. Spending is going up under Trump, too be sure, but it's a world away from previous Republican administrations.

What really matters for spending is who controls the purse strings, which is Congress. Until Clinton, Republican presidents had to bargain with Democrat Congresses to get what they wanted. That often meant agreeing to big spending bills. The Republican resurgence in Congress under Clinton marked a new era in spending, which comparatively speaking is way down on a compound annual growth rate basis, even under spendthrift Bush 43.

Personally I'm less fearful than I had been of a new spending spree under Trump with Republicans in control of Congress. Trump is adversarial with the Republican Establishment in a way that no Republican president of the past has been. Getting what he wants hasn't been at all easy for this very reason. Republicans are obstructing him no less than Democrats are even as Trump folds like a house of cards on taxes and regulation without getting anything in return, like a wall. At some point he's going to veto something, or go down to electoral defeat.

At any rate, talk of a new dramatic change is simply kooky.

Senator Cornyn reminds everyone that Jennifer Rubin is a fake conservative

Ford expects to be believed because she can't forget what happened to her, expects to be excused for not remembering details

Kavanaugh Accuser’s Lawyer Exposes Client’s Achilles’ Heel

You know Donald, Kushner wouldn't have to go to all that trouble if you just built The DAMN WALL

Kushner's mission improbable: Winning over wealthy Trump skeptics

Crickets from Chuck Grassley for 48 hours and counting, observing the Sabbath no doubt while Rome burns

Ka-va-naugh

Two more syllables than "Bork", but they both end in naw.

I just found out my new neighbor is in the bottom 2.88% of the population

He's a fat, white, father of two young girls whose idea of fun is spending the day at the pool, and he's a Twitter follower of Rachel Madcow.

Thank God for carvedilol.

John Brennan is the Democrats' self-admitted communist, James Comey is the Republicans'

Mr. Comey Goes To Washington (New York Magazine, 20 October 2003):

Comey has been savaged by William Safire and lauded by Chuck Schumer; just what kind of Republican is he, anyway? This sets Comey howling again. “I must be doing something right!” he says. “In college, I was left of center, and through a gradual process I found myself more comfortable with a lot of the ideas and approaches the Republicans were using.” He voted for Carter in 1980, but in ’84, “I voted for Reagan—I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now. I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”

Dianne Feinstein shouldn't only be censured by the US Senate, California voters should vote for her opponent in November

From the story here:

Regardless of the fate of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, the Senate should censure the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein. Her deception and maneuvering, condemned across the political spectrum, seriously interfered with the Senate’s performance of its constitutional duty to review judicial nominations, and unquestionably has brought the Senate into “dishonor and disrepute,” the standard that governs these matters. As a matter of institutional integrity, the Senate cannot let this wrong go unaddressed. ... Feinstein ... sought to keep her committee from timely and properly investigating an apparently serious charge of misconduct, and is still doing so, even in the face of criticism from all (or most) quarters. ...

As the second-richest member of the Senate, with a net worth of $94 million, Feinstein is presumably above the temptations to which [censured Senators] Dodd, Talmadge, and Durenberger succumbed. She does, however, face a difficult reelection campaign, with a serious enthusiasm gap on her left, the California Democratic party having refused to endorse her bid for a sixth term in office. Her conduct in arranging matters to make her appear the champion of an allegedly abused constituent, and perhaps positioning herself as the woman who sank the Kavanaugh nomination, can only help on that flank. Is a nakedly political motive for senatorial misbehavior any less reprehensible than a financial one?