I don’t know what kind of flower this is, but it’s pretty and yellow and looks kind of cool against the green background. Apparently that bug agrees with me. The picture was taken with a long lens and a wide aperture in order to get the shallow depth of field that blurs out both the foreground and background.
In terms of facts, the Senate questioning of Christine Blasey Ford went nowhere. We learned almost nothing new.
So the only thing left is theater criticism, and on that score Republicans crashed and burned brutally. Ford was an excellent, sympathetic witness. She was obviously sincere, helpful, and genuinely emotional. I’m not sure how she could have been better.
Conversely, having a prosecutor take over for the Republican questioning was a disaster. The Republicans looked cowardly for not being willing to be accountable for their own questions. And Mitchell simply didn’t score any points at all.
1:55 — Now Mitchell is doing her best to somehow suggest that Ford is being funded and advised by a cabal of Democrats. But no. Her lawyers are both working pro bono.
Are they going to go with the “lookalike” theory in a Senate heading? Really? ARE THEY GOING DOWN THIS ROAD!?!
Ford, to her credit, refuses to say the name of Ed Whelan’s doppelganger on national TV. Good for her.
2:05 — Kamala Harris is now giving yet another speech about what a hero Ford is and how the FBI should have been invited to investigate. Democrats seem way more interested in making sure everyone knows how much they care about sexual assault than they do in asking questions.
2:10 — Hoo boy. Mitchell is now griping about having to do her questioning in five-minute chunks. She’s sort of laughing it off, but obviously she’s not especially happy about how this worked. Then she tried to imply that Ford had deliberately avoided going through a “cognitive interview,” which would have really gotten to the truth of what happened. But that went nowhere, and now she’s done. As near as I can tell, her entire round of questioning brought up nothing new and shed no light on anything.
So far there have been no blockbusters at the hearing. Ford read an opening statement with a noticeably shaky voice, repeating the allegations she’s made from the start. The format is strange: every senator has five minutes for questioning, but the Republicans have turned their questioning over to a professional prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell. So each Democrat takes five minutes, then Mitchell takes five minutes, and so forth. I’ll bet no prosecutor has ever had to question a witness like this before.
11:10 — Patrick Leahy asked Ford for her most indelible memory of the attack: “the laughter between the two, they’re having fun at my expense.” This was delivered in a very shaky voice.
11:30 — Durbin: How sure are you that your attacker was Brett Kavanaugh? Ford: “100 percent.”
On Fox News, Bret Baier says hearing from Blasey Ford “is a totally different thing” than reading her allegations.
Chris Wallace: “This was extremely emotional, extremely raw, and extremely credible… This is a disaster for the Republicans.” pic.twitter.com/aSbznSJdHC
I have a feeling that’s going to keep plummeting after today’s hearing.
11:50 — Mitchell is putting up big maps showing the location of the “country club” and Ford’s parents’ home, where she lived at the time. So far, though, there’s no follow-up. What was the point of the maps?
12:00 — Mitchell is now going on and on about the fact that Ford has flown in an airplane many times even though Ford says that the Kavanaugh attack gave her lifelong claustrophobia. Is this leading up to some suggestion that, well, maybe the attack wasn’t all that bad, was it? But I can’t believe Mitchell will go there. She’ll just leave the implication hanging.
12:15 — I get that prosecutors are trained to go over the evidence slowly and in detail. You never know when something will pop up that you haven’t heard before or that contradicts previous testimony. But I’m genuinely not clear why Mitchell is going over the minutiae of Ford’s decision to come forward. What can she possibly get out of this?
12:30 — Mitchell wastes more time asking Ford the dates she talked to Rep. Eshoo and Sen. Feinstein and when she hired a lawyer. Maybe this is leading somewhere and there’s going to be a big Perry Mason moment at the end, but I sure don’t see it yet.
12:40 — I wonder if Mitchell has any idea how badly her performance is being panned?
unless she is building toward something that’s not clear, Mitchell has wasted too much time on ploddingly establishing the record and on process
Why is Rachel Mitchell burning up her time with questions about Christine Ford’s fear of flying, the geography of her neighborhood, and niggling details about how she first informed a local official about these allegations?
Is there a hidden method here that we’re all missing?
Last week, conservative stalwart Ed Whelan took to Twitter to suggest that Christine Blasey Ford was mistaken about her encounter with a drunken and violent Brett Kavanaugh at a house party when they were teenagers. It’s not that the attempted rape never happened, Whelan said, it’s that it was someone else who tried to rape her. He even named his suspect, a completely innocent man who has nothing to do with any of this.
Whelan apologized and took down his Twitter account the next day. Ever since, conservatives have been trying desperately to pretend he doesn’t exist and that they never knew him. But not everyone has forgotten. Earlier today the Senate Judiciary Committee published a timeline of its investigation so far, and it turns out that Whelan’s mystery suspect has come forward:
But wait! There’s another one:
There sure do seem to be a surprising number of people willing to incriminate themselves of felonies for the sake of helping Kavanaugh make it to the Supreme Court. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
And while we’re on the subject, Kavanaugh has claimed that although he wasn’t perfect as a teenager, he was pretty damn good. Sure, a beer now and then, but that’s pretty much it. For a light drinker, however, various documents from the period in question sure do seem to refer a lot to sex and heavy drinking. Here’s a definitely NSFW sample:
Keg City Club (Treasurer) — 100 Kegs Or Bust: this one is pretty self-explanatory.
Beach Week Ralph Club – Biggest Contributor:ralphing is a slang term for vomiting. The implication here is that during Beach Week Kavanaugh was the heaviest drinker and most prodigious vomiter.
FFFFFFFourth of July: this is apparently a variation of “Find them, finger them, fuck them, forget them.”
Boofed: not entirely clear, but apparently a variation of bufu, slang for buttfucker.
It is, of course, entirely possible that Kavanaugh, like lots of teenage boys, tossed off this kind of slang solely as a way of looking tough in front of his friends. Who knows? But this, along with other evidence, sure seems to indicate, at the very least, that Kavanaugh was a hard partier and a heavy drinker during his high school and college years. Was he also an FFFF man? I suppose it’s possible we’ll get a better idea about that at Thursday’s hearing.
I’m not going to pretend to be shocked by this, but…seriously?
President Trump said he rejected a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during the United Nations General Assembly this week and threatened on Wednesday to punish Canada by taxing the cars it exports into America, signaling a new low in relations between the two nations.
….Mr. Trump said he turned down a meeting with Mr. Trudeau because Canada had treated the United States “very badly” and because of its high dairy tariffs, which are preventing the United States from selling milk into Canada. A spokesman for Mr. Trudeau said the prime minister never requested such a meeting. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump appeared to snub Mr. Trudeau when he did not stand to shake the Canadian prime minister’s hand during a lunch at the United Nations summit meeting.
Unless someone is slipping my mind, Justin Trudeau is literally Donald Trump’s most hated foreign adversary. Justin Trudeau! The prime minister of Canada!
But why? Because Trudeau is movie-star handsome? Because the Trump Tower in Toronto removed his name? Because…oh hell, I can’t even think of anything else. I mean, it can’t really be over milk tariffs. Who the hell cares about that? Is it because Trump is still stewing over Trudeau’s comment that Canada “will not be pushed around” after he retaliated against Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs? I guess it could be, though other world leaders have said worse things.
I wonder if there’s something else going on? One thing’s for sure, it’s not because we’re running a big trade deficit with Canada.
Donald Trump is holding a press conference. I’m not really in a mental state where I think I can watch it, but I can follow it on Twitter, which is probably better anyway. Here’s a tidbit from a few minutes ago:
Trump lies again that Obama said he was “ready to go to war” with North Korea, this time adding for the first time, “You know how close he was to pressing the trigger for war?” There is no indication anything like this has happened.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has long provided something called the Employer Cost Index. The idea behind this number is that it includes the total cost of employing someone: wages, of course, but also health care, retirement benefits, paid leave, etc. This is useful because it tells us how much employers really have to spend to hire an extra person. Here’s the answer for the past decade:
Why is this interesting? Sometimes you’ll hear people suggest that, sure, wage growth has been slow, but that’s because employers are pouring a lot more money into health care premiums. And generally speaking, that’s true: health care costs have gone up a lot.
But as this chart shows, for the median worker the total cost of compensation has gone up only 2.6 percent over the past decade. That includes everything that employers have to pay for. In other words, the idea that wage growth is slow because the money is going somewhere else simply doesn’t hold water—and that’s true for workers at all income levels. Even the highest-paid workers, who have seen the best wage growth and who get the best benefits, have seen their total compensation go up by less than 1 percent per year.
And since I know you’re just bursting with curiosity about how well our corporate community has been doing during this same period, here you go:
There’s a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll out today. Their polling method prompted a lot of skepticism during the 2016 election, and in the end it turned out to be too favorable toward Donald Trump. Still, they employed a unique approach that showed promise if they fixed some of the methodological mistakes they made. That makes it worth paying attention to:
Democrats had a 14-point margin, 55% to 41%, when likely voters were asked which party’s candidate they would cast a ballot for if the election were held now. If that advantage holds up until election day, just less than six weeks away, it would almost surely be large enough to sweep a Democratic majority into the House.
A 14-point margin in the generic congressional poll is huge. And yet, thanks to Republican gerrymandering, the Times is careful to say only that it would “almost surely” be enough to lead to a Democratic victory. I sure hope they’re just being ultra-cautious out there in their new digs in El Segundo. And check this out:
Women, who already leaned significantly toward the Democrats, have shifted further in their direction, widening a large gender gap. The poll found women now favor the Democrats by 28 percentage points, 62% to 34%, among likely voters.
Twenty-eight points! And this poll was “largely completed” before Brett Kavanaugh hit the news. If Republicans keep up their “fuck the women, we’re confirming Brett” attitude for much longer, I figure they’ll be down to a crazification factor 27 percent among women who are likely to vote. Hell, maybe even some of the crazy ones will defect.
UPDATE: I originally called the LAT poll “pretty accurate” in the 2016 race, which isn’t really true. It did predict a Trump win, but only by projecting a 3-point victory in the popular vote, which was off by nearly six points. I’ve changed the first paragraph of the post to reflect this.
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