Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Brett Kavanaugh's girlfriend when he was 17 backs him up

The Wall Street Journal reports here:

Maura Kane, who dated Judge Kavanaugh for several months when they were both 17-year-old high-school students, said in an interview Wednesday that she didn’t know Ms. Swetnick and didn’t believe such parties occurred. “The allegations are so outrageous and insane,” Ms. Kane said in an interview. “It’s absolutely ridiculous, and we stand by Brett.”

Rasmussen Generic Congressional Ballot Wednesday 9/26/18

46-43-3-8

Democrat-Republican-other-undecided

An oldie but a goodie from 2009


AM radio's incessant propagandists for women and LGBTs of the Ad Council lied in 2012 that they created Rosie the Riveter

And their lie remains on the record, here at HuffPo, because, you know, women can never lie:

“Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires.” “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.” “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” “Take a Bite Out of Crime. “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste.” You’ve heard these slogans, right? Whether you’re old enough to remember them or they’re familiar because they’ve seeped through our popular culture (Rosie the Riveter paraphernalia is everywhere these days), they ring a bell. They’re memorable and iconic. And they were created by the Ad Council. ... You know about Rosie the Riveter, but did you know that she helped recruit over two million women to join the workforce during the war?

But this so-called Rosie the Riveter isn't Rosie, and wasn't created until 1943, and not by the Ad Council but by Westinghouse's artist, a man, J. Howard Miller, for internal use only and was little seen:

"We Can Do It!" is an American World War II wartime poster produced by J. Howard Miller in 1943 for Westinghouse Electric as an inspirational image to boost worker morale. The poster was very little seen during World War II. It was rediscovered in the early 1980s and widely reproduced in many forms, often called "We Can Do It!" but also called "Rosie the Riveter" after the iconic figure of a strong female war production worker. The "We Can Do It!" image was used to promote feminism and other political issues beginning in the 1980s. ... [D]uring the war the image was strictly internal to Westinghouse, displayed only during February 1943, and was not for recruitment but to exhort already-hired women to work harder. ... No more than 1,800 copies of the 17-by-22-inch (559 by 432 mm) "We Can Do It!" poster were printed. It was not initially seen beyond several Westinghouse factories in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the midwestern U.S., where it was scheduled to be displayed for two five-day work weeks starting Monday, February 15, 1943. ... During World War II, the "We Can Do It!" poster was not connected to the 1942 song "Rosie the Riveter", nor to the widely seen Norman Rockwell painting called Rosie the Riveter that appeared on the cover of the Memorial Day issue of the Saturday Evening Post, May 29, 1943. The Westinghouse poster was not associated with any of the women nicknamed "Rosie" who came forward to promote women working for war production on the home front. Rather, after being displayed for two weeks in February 1943 to some Westinghouse factory workers, it disappeared for nearly four decades.

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


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


Tuesday, September 25, 2018

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:

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


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. 


Monday, September 24, 2018

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


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.