Yes, a lot of it. I think he’s very likely to be guilty of the attack on Ford and the attack on Ramirez; I think it’s more likely than not he’s guilty of the attacks Swetnick described, though I’m significantly less confident in that case.
Reminder that the right on Tumblr and elsewhere are lying through their teeth about “no evidence.” Would this be “beyond a reasonable doubt”? Probably not (for sexual assault; it certainly is for repeated perjury), but that is not the correct standard for lifetime court appointments. There is a clear preponderance of the evidence.
@argumate, because you let one of your askers say this unchallenged, presumably due to not following things as closely.
Even if every accusation against Kavanaugh was totally fabricated, that would still leave us with “would this guy who, when accused of something, dodges questions by shouting and crying about how much he loves beer make a good judge?”
“Those results would reveal that 83 percent of black and 66 percent of Latinx voters believe Blasey Ford, compared to a mere 40 percent of white voters. And that 80 percent of black and 69 percent of Latinx voters considered her honest compared to just 54 percent of white voters.
This gap persists even when you isolate out white women, a demographic some pundits believed would be outraged at how Blasey Ford was treated by Senate Republicans (her testimony—deemed “credible” by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee—was essentially thrown out once Kavanaugh began rage-crying).
According to the Quinnipiac poll, nearly half (47 percent) of white women considered Kavanaugh to be honest. The numbers for black and Latinx voters? Just 7 and 34 percent, respectively. A plurality of white women did believe Blasey Ford (46 percent)—but it was nowhere near the majority, as was the case with black and Latinx voters.
Parsing out this data matters, because if journalists don’t, they can misleadingly run with narratives like the one in a recent article from the AP, which boldly declared in the headline: “Many women line up in support for Kavanaugh.”
In other words, the exact same breakdown as the ‘16 election.
“On the Senate floor late Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made a new and tantalizing claim about what’s in the FBI documents on Brett M. Kavanaugh that all senators have now reviewed. Senators are severely limited in what they can say about these documents, which are summaries of the interviews that the FBI conducted as part of their renewed background check into Kavanaugh, after Christine Blasey Ford went public with charges that he sexually assaulted her, which led to a host of new claims like that one and others about his drinking at the time.
“’Senators have been muzzled. So I will now say three things that committee staff has explained are permissible to say without violating committee rules. … One: This was not a full and fair investigation. It was sharply limited in scope and did not explore the relevant confirming facts. Two: The available documents do not exonerate Mr. Kavanaugh.
”‘And three: the available documents contradict statements Mr. Kavanaugh made under oath. I would like to back up these points with explicit statements from the FBI documents — explicit statements that should be available for the American people to see. But the Republicans have locked the documents behind closed doors.’
“Warren, then, appears to have consulted with Judiciary Committee lawyers and was seemingly told that per the rules, she could divulge just this much about what is in the documents, and not a syllable more. At a minimum, Warren appears to be suggesting that there is material gathered from these FBI interviews that demonstrates that Kavanaugh lied to the committee.
…“It’s more than a little troubling that the Senate is going to vote on something as important as a Supreme Court nomination with the American people entirely in the dark on the matter.” [Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin]
You clearly knew this the moment it was announced that President Trump approved the investigation, but this is just a reminder that the investigation is going to be a joke. It’s not going to provide the answers that might matter, but only the ones that can yield results the ruling party wants. When a week passes and the investigators have “found nothing”, the Senate will vote and confirm Kavanaugh.
I can’t remember if I told this story already, but I’ll tell it again anyway because it’s relevant.
When I was in high school, we had an extremely popular music teacher. He’d been working at the school for decades, everyone who knew him loved him. He was the band director, worked with the annual musicals, helped organize concerts, the whole nine yards. He was one of my favourite teachers, and even after I graduated, I would sometimes stop in at the school just to say hi to him.
In early 2016, a few months before he was set to retire, he was accused of sexual abuse.
It started out with one anonymous accuser, then another came forward. Because of the timing right before his retirement, people thought it was just some immature kids making up shit to ruin his reputation. Or maybe it was someone who’d misunderstood a friendly arm around the shoulders. It just wasn’t possible in all of our minds that he could be a predator. It went completely against what we knew of him as a teacher and a person. In the fall out, commenters on Facebook accused those lodging charges against him of trying to ruin a good man’s reputation. Other teachers even joined in in the comments section of newspapers.
About a year later in May 2017, right before he was set to go to trial, he died in a car accident. Car collided with a garbage truck and he was killed immediately. No one thought we’d get any closure. I went to his funeral. I hugged old classmates and teachers, his wife, his kids. I believed the victims, but it was also incredibly hard to let go of a person who may or may not have been innocent.
Then one day a few months ago, I got a message out of the blue from an old classmate. She had run into another classmate earlier that day and she had been the one to press the first charge.
This is a woman who was one of that teacher’s favourite students and was always attached to him at the hip. She used to hang out in his classroom all the time, she was in all the bands, every concert. She idolized him. She had been in therapy for years following graduation as she slowly realized that she had been groomed and preyed upon. I reached out to her to offer her an ear as her story slowly spread, and I learned more about the whole thing than I wish I had.
She was slowly letting people know her story as the dust settled after his death, but she had wound up cutting ties with almost everyone from high school after she pressed charges. She couldn’t handle everyone assuming his innocence and her as a liar. People who she’d thought were friends wouldn’t even entertain the idea that he could have been a predator, so she cut everyone off to protect herself. When he died, she said she felt denied her chance to face him in court and get closure. She told me that the detective assigned to her tipped her off that the fact that the police did not immediately release our teacher’s name after his accident was a sign that it was most likely suicide.
I have zero doubt in my mind that she is telling the truth. The fact that it took her more than 10 years to press charges is irrelevant. She was a child when he started abusing her. He groomed her to think that what was happening was normal and acceptable. She respected him loved him, so she didn’t question him. She was taught to think that what was happening was her fault, that she was the young temptress coming on to an older married man, so she didn’t tell anyone. She’s not a “perfect victim”, but she’s one of the bravest people I’ve ever met.
Victims like my classmate and Professor Christine Ford are not less believable because of the time that passed between their abuses and accusations. There are so many reasons why people wait, and those reasons do not invalidate their experiences or make them liars. We owe them so much better than making excuses for their abusers because of the timing of the disclosure. -V
I know this is a committee hearing and not a court hearing but if Kavanaugh were presiding over his own confirmation he would hold himself in contempt. No decent judge would allow that kind of backtalk and refusal to answer from a witness, or showboating and leading the witness from the examiners.
I do get the point of defensive cynicism or preemptive defeatism, of people saying “It doesn’t matter what the FBI finds, they’ll confirm him anyway” or that the investigation is only a whitewashing, but it makes me want to scream and honestly it’s a borderline trigger because in my head its tone so vividly echoes every single sneering, smug, self-satisfied know-it-all I have ever known, going
Don’t care. Don’t hope. Don’t engage. Don’t try.
Also, y’all, we are in a timeline in which a week is a long time. Multiple Republican senators are actually still making waffling noises. We don’t know what the FBI investigation will find. A lot can happen in the next few days.
And I get it, I get wanting to protect yourself from grief and disappointment in advance. But I will probably be hiding everyone doing this on Facebook because I personally just cannot with it right now.
This isn’t over. Call your senators. If you don’t think they’re sympathetic to the credible sexual assault allegations part, talk about the fishy finances part, or the committed perjury in his confirmation hearings to the Circuit Court part.
And maybe he will be confirmed anyway, and it will be devastating, but I cannot go back to existing in a way where I just refuse to emotionally engage with the world.
So please don’t tell me to just go ahead and concede defeat.
Anyway, here’s a list of real things that have happened on local, state, national, and international levels since the 2016 election.
Somebody in the Congress was caught editing Wikipedia to include Kavanaugh’s definition of “Devil’s Triangle.” Note that his definition has only been in use, by him, and only used by him, since he coughed it up on the fly to substantiate his lie during the committee hearing yesterday. This country’s leadership is a joke.
I keep seeing this but how does anyone think that the person who added that entry SPECIFICALLY MENTIONING IT AS A GAME BRETT KAVANAUGH LIKED wasn’t doing it to lampoon him?
Kavanaugh didn’t just DARVO his way through yesterday’s hearing:
his bluster, tears, rage, and blame-shifting also allowed him to dodge a
remarkable number of questions raised by the senators.
Ford, by contrast, answered virtually every question put to her.
Vox went through the transcript and painstakingly logged whether each
question raised was addressed. They confirmed the impression that
Kavanaugh was dodging the questions and Ford wasn’t, and produced an excellent interactive graphic that allows us to visualize the both witnesses’ forthrightness and drill down on each question and statement.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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