Kavanaugh Should Step Down. 

Benjamin Wittes, ATLANTIC

I have known Brett Kavanaugh for a long time—in many different contexts. I am fond of him personally. I think the world of him intellectually. I don’t believe he lied in his Senate testimony. I don’t believe he’s itching to get on the Supreme Court to protect Donald Trump from Robert Mueller. I’m much less afraid of conservative judges than are many of my liberal friends. As recently as a few days ago, I was cheerfully vouching for Kavanaugh’s character.

If Kavanaugh were to ask my advice today—and to be clear, he hasn’t done so—I would tell him he almost certainly should have his nomination withdrawn. The circumstances in which he should fight this out are, in my view, extremely limited. I would advise him against letting Senate Republicans ram his nomination through in a fashion that will forever attach an asterisk to his service on the Supreme Court. Assuming she is not impugning him maliciously, Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, deserves better than that. The Court deserves better than that. And Kavanaugh himself, if he is telling the truth about his conduct in high school, deserves better than to be confirmed under circumstances which tens of millions of people will regard, with good reason, as tainted.

Let’s start with a blunt reality: The sum of the allegations against Kavanaugh is, if true, disqualifying. On both left and right, commentators have suggested that the assault allegation alone is not grounds for Kavanaugh’s rejection—even if true. Let’s leave for another day the question of whether that’s right. The allegation does not present on its own. Kavanaugh has categorically denied the incident took place. That means that if it did take place, he is either lying about it now or, short of that, perhaps has no memory of the matter. The former is certainly disqualifying. The latter, even if Kavanaugh’s memory is genuinely and honestly impaired and he actually believes the incident never took place, cannot be distinguished publicly from the former. Though Kavanaugh has been careful not to slime Ford, his denial of the incident impugns her anyway, which is legitimate if his denial is accurate. It will not do, however, to impeach her credibility wrongly and then ask for confirmation to the highest court in the land because the false denial was not intentionally false. If the allegations are true, Kavanaugh cannot be confirmed.

Kavanaugh is an excellent lawyer. He knew, I’m sure, when he issued his categorical denial that he was leaving himself no wiggle room. Perhaps he intended the move as a show of strength, a hint that he will rebut Ford’s allegations persuasively when given the chance to speak. Whatever the motivation, the move locks him in. The only plausible defense now for him is self-exculpation on the facts.

And in this endeavor, Kavanaugh himself bears the burden of proof. This sounds like unjust ground to stake out in a society in which the accused is innocent until proven guilty. But in practical terms, Kavanaugh is the one who has to persuade the marginal senator to vote for him. He is the one who has to give Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski enough confidence in him that they can vote to confirm believing they can defend their actions to a legion of angry voters. It is he, not Ford, who needs to count to 50.

The injustice, in fact, is largely optical. The question before us, after all, is not whether to punish Kavanaugh or whether to assign liability to him. It’s whether to bestow on him an immense honor that comes with great power. Kavanaugh is applying for a much-coveted job. And the burden of convincing in such situations always lies with the applicant. The standard for elevation to the nation’s highest court is not that the nominee established a “reasonable doubt” that the serious allegations against him were true.

Read more at Benjamin Wittes, ATLANTIC

__________________________________________________

McConnell assertion that‘Kavanaugh will be on the U.S. Supreme Court’ just created doubt about Republicans' intentions on Ford hearing.

WASHINGTON POST

A big reason Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s accuser says she doesn’t want to testify in the Senate without first having her claims investigated by the FBI is she doesn’t think she’ll be treated objectively and fairly by politicians.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) just thoroughly justified Christine Blasey Ford’s concerns. In comments Friday, he laid plain his intention to put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, apparently no matter what Ford has to share.

“Here’s what I want to tell you,” McConnell said Friday morning at a summit for social conservatives. “In the very near future, Judge Kavanaugh will be on the U.S. Supreme Court. So, my friends, keep the faith. Don’t get rattled by all this. We’re going to plow right through it and do our job.”

There is no other way to read McConnell’s comment other than that the Ford allegation doesn’t matter to him, at least not when he’s so close to fulfilling his goal of firming up the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 conservative majority weeks before an election.

Put another way: A woman accused a Supreme Court nominee of drunkenly pinning her to a bed, groping her and covering her mouth when she screamed when they were in high school decades ago. She provided therapist notes from well before Kavanaugh was such a public figure. She took a polygraph test. She is willing to undergo an FBI investigation and testify under oath before the Senate. These are all moves that outside experts say make her story credible, and yet here is the most powerful politician in the Senate appearing to brush all of that aside because he wants to “do [his] job.”

Read more at WASHINGTON POSt

Stormy Daniels’s memoir: Funny, vulgar, brash and believable.

Stormy Daniels speaks during a ceremony in her honor in West Hollywood, Calif., in May. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

WASHINGTON POST

Stormy Daniels would like to set the record straight, and the first thing she wants you to know is that she didn’t want to be here. She hates public speaking. She kept the bad sex she had with Donald Trump a secret, even from her husband, and even after some of the people she loves most in the world begged her to come forward to save the republic. She’s not a gold digger or an attention seeker or a bimbo looking for her 15 minutes. And she’s definitely not a liar.

That is the current that runs through Daniels’s new book, “Full Disclosure,” which publishes Oct. 2. (The Washington Post obtained an early copy.) Daniels knows we’re all interested in the juicy bits about Trump, but she doesn’t get there until several chapters in, after detailing a dysfunctional childhood in Louisiana with an uninterested and then absent father and a mother who falls apart as a result. She is repeatedly raped at age 9 by a child molester, and when she finally tells a school counselor, her story isn’t believed. Her mother pretends it never happened, fearing that the assaults will be blamed on negligent parenting. Hers is a childhood marked by indifferent and sometimes callous adults, and she has to prove her basic worth again and again.

Daniels eventually finds solace in horseback riding, which helps her pull away from a life that felt inevitable, a theme she comes back to many times as she considers the absurdity of her current situation (“I should be living in a trailer back in Louisiana, with six kids and no teeth,” she writes in the book’s prologue, as she instead prepares to accept the keys to the city as West Hollywood proclaims Stormy Daniels Day). Her fixation on riding means she avoids drinking, drugs and sex, all parts of a normal teenage social life, but things that can short-circuit plans of escape for those lower on the socioeconomic rungs. “I would see yet another girl who lived around me suddenly pregnant and would say to myself silently, Can’t ride a horse if you’re pregnant.”

That focus also animates Daniels’s professional life, as she starts stripping in high school (focusing on consistent clients rather than gravitating to one-time big tippers), moves on to more-profitable stripping road shows and then tries the adult-film industry. She seeks to write and later direct adult films, and finds quick success.

She is ambitious and bright, and that comes through — she doesn’t just show us, she tells us, repeatedly mentioning that she graduated from a magnet high school, that she has a photographic memory and that she’s smarter than you think. 

Her rags-to-riches story tacks a familiar course, but she got there via sex and brazen power-seeking — things women are not supposed to be quite so blatant about. 

Now that she’s wealthy and famous, Daniels’s story should be one of redemption, wherein Stormy goes from hooker with a heart of gold to soft, maternal and quiet (to be clear, Daniels never worked as a prostitute, but her detractors paint her as such). She should find true meaning in motherhood; she should take on the polite trappings of the middle class.

Instead, she writes that pregnancy sucked, she got really fat, and she demanded that her husband do porn, too, so that if they ever got divorced he couldn’t use her job against her in a custody battle. She conceals the Trump fling from him. He struggles with mental health issues, and their marriage falls apart under the glare of the public eye. She clearly adores her daughter but also very obviously loves her job, and is proud of the success she’s had in her industry. Yes, she was raped as a little girl, but she maintains that didn’t drive her to porn.

-------

Now, the part you've been waiting for:

From The Guardian:

Trump’s bodyguard invites Daniels to dinner, which turns out to be an invitation to Trump’s penthouse, she writes, in a description of alleged events that Daniels has disclosed previously but which in the book are rendered with new and lurid detail. She describes Trump’s penis as “smaller than average” but “not freakishly small.”

“He knows he has an unusual penis,” Daniels writes. “It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool…

“I lay there, annoyed that I was getting f**ked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart…

“It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.”

‘100 Kegs or Bust’: Kavanaugh friend, Mark Judge, has spent years writing about high school debauchery

Mark Judge

WASHINGTON POST

A review of books, articles and blog posts by Judge — a freelance writer who has shifted among jobs at a record store, substitute teaching, housesitting and most recently at a liquor store — describes an ’80s private-school party scene in which heavy drinking and sexual encounters were standard fare.

Judge wrote about the pledge he and his friends at the all-male school on Rockville Pike in North Bethesda, Md., made to drink 100 kegs of beer before graduation. On their way to that goal, there was a “disastrous” party “at my house where the place was trashed,” Judge wrote in his book “God and Man at Georgetown Prep.” Kavanaugh listed himself in the class yearbook as treasurer of the “100 Kegs or Bust” club.

“I’ll be the first one to defend guys being guys,” Judge wrote in a 2015 article on the website Acculturated. He described a party culture of “drinking and smoking and hooking up.” During senior year, Judge said he and his pals hired a stripper and bought a keg for a bachelor party they threw to honor their school’s music teacher.

“I drank too much and did stupid things,” he said in his memoir.

“Most of the time everyone, including the girls, was drunk,” Judge wrote in “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk,” a memoir of his alcoholism and recovery. “If you could breathe and walk at the same time, you could hook up with someone. This did not mean going all the way . . . but after a year spent in school without girls, heavy petting was basically an orgy.”

While many of his classmates moved on to careers in law, politics, business and education, Judge seemed to some friends to stay fixed in the experiences of his adolescence. Over time, his politics shifted from left to right, and his writing often focused on his view of masculinity (“the wonderful beauty of uncontrollable male passion”) and his concern that gay culture was corroding traditional values.

In one column for Acculturated, Judge wrote that it is “important that for some brief moments in his life — preferably when he is young — a man should be, at times, arrogant, a little reckless, and looking for kicks.”

Judge — who did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment and who has deleted his Twitter account and taken down videos from YouTube and Vimeo — is a recovering alcoholic who has traveled a rocky road since high school. He took seven years to earn his bachelor’s degree at Catholic University — a delay he attributed to “my fondness for bars and rock and roll.”

Maryland state Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. (D-Montgomery), one of Judge’s classmates at Georgetown Preparatory School, recalled him as “an unhappy person who was happy to make other people unhappy. ‘Bully’ may be an overused term, but he regularly belittled people he perceived as being lower on the high school hierarchy.”

Kavanaugh in 2015: 'What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep'

POLITICO

Georgetown Prep's unofficial saying, according to Brett Kavanaugh: What happens there, stays there.

The Supreme Court nominee made the crack in a 2015 speech at Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law, which he said was the alma mater of three of his friends. Kavanaugh said the trio had also been classmates when he attended Catholic high school at Georgetown Prep.

"But fortunately, we had a good saying that we've held firm to to this day ... which is: What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep," Kavanaugh said, according to a video of the speech. "I think that's been a good thing for all of us."

Kavanaugh gave no other context for the joke, but it gained attention anyway after it first surfaced on MSNBC because the judge has recently been accused of misconduct while he was a high school student.

Ford floats Thursday testimony, other conditions in talks with Senate

A discussion Thursday night between Christine Blasey Ford's attorneys and Senate staffers capped a chaotic day of back-and-forth.

POLITICO

Christine Blasey Ford's attorneys held a high-stakes call with Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday night that ended with no decision on when or if Ford will testify about allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

One source described the call as “positive,” though there is no ironclad agreement to have Ford appear. Ford’s attorneys also have made some requests that the committee won’t accommodate — such as subpoenaing Mark Judge, whom Ford alleges was in the room when Kavanaugh groped and forced himself on her when both were in high school. Senate Republicans had planned a Monday hearing and sought an agreement by Friday morning to appear, though those are no longer viewed as hard deadlines.

 Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)

Ford lawyers Debra Katz and Lisa Banks spoke to staff from Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) about possible scenarios for an appearance next week. And Ford seems amenable to a public hearing after being offered a private one, though with some stipulations.

The lawyers requested a Thursday hearing in which Kavanaugh would appear first, said Ford is opposed to be being questioned by outside counsel and mentioned having just one camera in the hearing room, a second source said. Republicans are not going to agree to make Kavanaugh testify first.

Ford's attorneys also have said she's facing death threats and asked for help mitigating security concerns; she'd likely receive U.S. Capitol Police detail.

Democrats and Republicans are arguing over how to handle a hearing that would consider testimony from Christine Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh about an alleged sexual assault.
Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker

What Would a Serious Investigation of Brett Kavanaugh Look Like?

NEW YORKER

Considering what would constitute due process for Kavanaugh, then, involves reflection on whether Kavanaugh is best compared to a defendant who has been accused of a crime and stands to lose his liberty, or to a student who has been accused of misconduct and stands to lose an educational opportunity. If the answer is the former, that would suggest that Kavanaugh should be afforded many of the protective trappings of the criminal process, such as the right to cross-examine a witness, and that a heavy burden of proof lies on the side of the accuser. If it’s the latter, though, then perhaps a hearing can be dispensed with, and the standard of proof can be the lower threshold of preponderance of the evidence. Neither analogy is appropriate, though, because Kavanaugh does not stand to lose something that he already has. He is petitioning the public for the privilege of holding one of the highest public offices in the country, and he should have to persuade us that he didn’t do what he is accused of doing. But, of course, this doesn’t entirely capture the mix of reputational losses and gains at stake, for the individuals and institutions involved and for the country as a whole.

Kavanaugh faces significant risks. He has called Ford’s allegation “completely false,” saying, in a statement, “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes—to her or to anyone.” If we believe her account over Judge Kavanaugh’s flat-out denial, then it appears that he has lied about the incident and seems prepared to lie under oath at next week’s hearing. (During the earlier hearings, Senator Hirono asked Kavanaugh whether he had committed sexual assault as “a legal adult,” which he was not quite at the age of seventeen.) If he does lie in defending himself, the risk of perjury looms. And while criminal defendants who deny their guilt and are convicted do not then normally face prosecution for perjury, untruthful testimony by someone who is seeking to be confirmed for the Supreme Court would be less forgivable.

Further complicating Kavanaugh’s testimony is the fact that Maryland, where Ford says the party was held, does not have a statute of limitations for felonies. In theory, Kavanaugh could be criminally prosecuted now or in the future, and the risk to him at the hearing includes potential criminal jeopardy. Although he was a juvenile at the time of the alleged assault, attempted rape is a crime for which a juvenile defendant in Maryland may be tried as an adult. This country routinely levies harsh and life-changing penalties on teen-agers, especially boys of color, who are overrepresented in our jails and prisons. It would be ironic if this nomination became an occasion for meaningful reflection on the need for leniency toward young people who have made grave mistakes. Meanwhile, Kavanaugh doesn’t appear to be taking chances with his potential liability. He has hired Beth Wilkinson, one of the best trial lawyers in the country.

When Senator Hirono questioned Kavanaugh about sexual misconduct, she noted that he was a former law clerk and longtime friend of the retired judge Alex Kozinski, formerly of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Last year, Kozinski resigned amid multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, before a federal judicial council could investigate the allegations. (Kavanaugh said that he had no knowledge of Kozinski’s inappropriate behavior before it became public.) If any sexual-misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh from the time since he became a judge were to surface, he too, could be investigated by a judicial council. The person who would have to call for such an investigation would be the chief judge of the District of Columbia Circuit, Merrick Garland.

Chief judge of the District of Columbia Circuit, Merrick Garland.

Republican Senators Have 70% Chance of Keeping Control o/t Senate.

NATE SILVER, FIVE THIRTY EIGHT

Our congressional forecasts reflect a blend of several different methods of prediction. But for the most part, those methods tell a fairly consistent story. In the House, for instance, district-by-district polls, the generic congressional ballot and historical trends in midterm elections all point toward Democrats winning the national popular vote by somewhere in the range of 8 to 10 percentage points, which would very probably be enough for them to take control of the chamber.¹ So do what we call the “fundamentals,” non-polling indicators that have empirically been useful predictors of races for Congress, such as fundraising totals, past margins of victory and several factors related to incumbency.²

Likewise in the Senate, the different versions of our model, which blend these methods together in different ways, tell a similar overall story to one another. It’s a reasonably happy story for Republicans because the Senate map, which consists overwhelmingly of Democratic-held seats, is highly favorable for the GOP this cycle. The polling-driven Lite version of our Senate forecast has the GOP finishing with 51.3 Senate seats and having about a 5 in 7 chance (more precisely, 71 percent) of keeping control of the chamber.³ The Classic version, which incorporates fundamentals, has them with 50.8 seats and about a 2 in 3 chance (68 percent) of maintaining control instead.⁴ If you go down to the decimal point, the Classic forecast is ever-so-slightly better for Democrats than the Lite forecast — which implies that the fundamentals are ever-so-slightly better for them than polls — but it isn’t a big overall difference.

The word “overall” is doing a lot of work in the previous sentence, however, because while the top-line prognosis on who might control the Senate is similar in all three versions of our model, the forecasts differ quite a bit from race to race. In particular:

• The fundamentals are more bullish than polls for Democrats in several states with Democratic incumbents — most importantly, in Florida, Missouri and North Dakota.
• But fundamentals are more bearish for Democrats in two important open-seat races: Tennessee and the Mississippi special election.
• Polls and fundamentals are fairly consistent with one another in states with Republican incumbents — including in Texas, where fundamentals support the notion of a competitive race between Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Beto O’Rourke.

In this article, I’m going to focus on the first category only: races featuring Democratic incumbents. We’ll cover the other two categories in an upcoming piece.

NATE SILVER, FIVE THIRTYEIGHT

After Hurricane Florence, North & South Carolina grapple with floods, outages and endless water. At Least 33 Deaths.

A drone captures the widespread flooding from tropical storm Florence in New Bern, N.C., on Saturday. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

WASHINGTON POST

WILMINGTON, N.C. — The water is everywhere — flooding interstates, swamping homes and swelling rivers that keep climbing. The rain stopped falling, but the water remains, endless water clogging up the highway, overwhelming gauges meant to measure rivers, stretching out in every direction.

“Even though there’s no substantial rain now in the forecast and the sun may be shining, rivers continue to rise, and we will see more flooding,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) said at a briefing Tuesday.

The storm has pummeled North Carolina, leaving people here stranded at home, blocked from traveling, sweltering as they wait for the power to come on and the water to recede.

Florence, the storm that brought the misery, has gone from a hurricane to a tropical depression to a meandering system that dropped rain over the Mid-Atlantic and southern New England on Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service. It left behind deaths in at least three states and carved an arc of destruction that had not fully become clear, though one preliminary analysis said could cost up to $20 billion in property losses.

Florence was another 1,000-year rain event. Is this the new normal as the planet warms?

Four states have set tropical storm rainfall records in the past year.

WASHINGTON POST

Over a massive region of southeast North Carolina and northeast South Carolina, Florence produced an extraordinary rainstorm that statistically has a 1-in-100 chance of occurring each year. Over substantial areas, the deluge had a 0.1 percent chance of happening, what is known as a 1,000-year event.

These exceptional rainfall events keep happening and appear to be part of a trend toward more extreme tropical rainmakers, probably connected to climate change.

Trump claim that FBI can't probe Kavanaugh allegations is wrong, ex-officials say

Former government officials from both parties questioned the GOP's argument against FBI involvement in the high-profile controversy, which Kavanaugh's accuser has requested.

POLITICO
The worst is yet to come for Kavanaugh’s accuser. Take it from this sexual assault attorney.


WASHINGTON POST

When 11 men interrogate: GOP tries to head off Kavanaugh debacle

The specter of Anita Hill looms over next week's hearing on Christine Blasey Ford's sexual assault allegation.

POLITICO

Hirono: Kavanaugh Is Fudging the Truth

The Hawaii senator believes Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser. And she thinks the court nominee was misleading in sworn testimony.

POLITICO

Christine Blasey Ford wants an FBI investigation before she’ll testify about Kavanaugh

VOX


A former sex-crimes prosecutor analyzed Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh. She finds it credible..


WASHINGTON POST

Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a public hearing on the Kavanaugh sexual assault accusation

A committee vote on his nomination has also been delayed.

VOX

When Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University in California, came forward with a sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over the weekend, all eyes turned to the Senate: Would this stop the confirmation proceedings in their tracks?

By Monday evening, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s scheduled vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation had been delayed. Both Ford and Kavanaugh are scheduled to testify publicly in at a Senate hearing on Monday, September 24.

• A committee vote on Kavanaugh’s hearing has not been rescheduled — yet. This would be the first vote in the process of confirming Kavanaugh to the Court and serves as a recommendation to the Senate as a whole. The full Senate can still vote — and confirm — Kavanaugh even without the Judiciary Committee’s approval.
• Statements from both Republican and Democratic senators suggest an interest in investigating these allegations. But there is a big question about what that investigation would look like.
• Democrats want the FBI to spearhead the investigation into sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh, not Congress. They argue that these allegations require a formal investigation and note that the partisan handling of Kavanaugh’s nomination thus far suggests that Congress is not up to the task. 

The likelihood of a protracted and ugly political fight over a crucial Supreme Court seat now hangs heavily over Washington, D.C.