I believe her.  Dr. Ford seemed nervous but she said she was terrified so…that fit.  She didn’t know every detail and she said so – and even apologized for the fact.  But she remembered relevant bits – and she remembered the attack.  The laughter of her assailants, she said, was seared into her memory.  She asked for the FBI to look into the matter specifically to help her nail down some of the details.

Him?  At stages, three different words popped into my mind about him: combative, evasive, and arrogant.  He argued.  He interrupted.  He hurled invective – at the woman, Senator Klobuchar, who was questioning him.  He knew each Senator had only five minutes.  When he was asked a question, he filibustered.  He rambled on as long as possible about things that were not relevant, never answering the question.  Hell, he might have read ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ to the same effect.

I thought the GOP had a good line of attack when they kept hammering on the question of why Senator Feinstein held the information so long before making it public.  Honestly, it was a good point and quite effective – until Feinstein took the floor and stated flatly that she never released the information.  Feinstein reminded people that Dr. Ford had, in fact, told her story to a select number of people.  Perhaps, the suggestion was made, one of them leaked the story to the press at the eleventh hour – when it became clear that Kavanaugh was a shoo-in.  Perhaps it was a last ditch effort to stop a depraved individual from ascending to the highest court in this once-great nation.

That would be exactly the kind of thing the FBI might discover had they reopened the background check.  Who leaked the information?  The GOP was quick to point out that the FBI doesn’t reach conclusions.  In fact, they pointed it out over and over.  Apparently, they were hoping people wouldn’t realize that the FBI doesn’t need to reach conclusions in order to provide corroboration.  Kavanaugh attempted to portray himself as a sainted soul who has always and only attempted to live saintly.  If an FBI background check discovers he was a hard-partying animal who often got blind drunk, it’s not a conclusion – but it DOES give the lie to Kavanaugh’s faulty portrayal of himself.

The Democrats asked Kavanaugh repeatedly if he would agree to have the FBI investigate the charges.  He whined about how this “false” charge had ruined his life.  The Democrats pointed out, rightly, that an independent third party investigation could help him clear his name.  He deferred.  He dodged.  He evaded.  When they asked about investigation, he answered about hearings.  Finally, Senator Harris said, “I’ll take that as a no”.  It’s perfectly reasonable under those circumstances for observers to conclude that he didn’t expect such an inquiry would, in fact, clear his name so much as lend credence to Dr. Ford’s account…

Nobody knows what happened in that room except the three people who were in it – and one of them, Mark Judge, was not even invited to speak.  Wait, not invited?  Strike that.  It should have read: went into hiding.  As the only other person in that room, he should have been questioned.  Apparently, the GOP and Kavanaugh couldn’t take that risk…

I’ll tell you this:  I thought Dr. Ford acted exactly the way a person would act if she was telling the truth.  Conversely, I thought Judge Kavanaugh (and the GOP, actually) acted exactly the way a person would act if she was telling the truth.

But I expect that the GOP is going to debase and dishonor themselves further – if such a thing is possible – and We, the people will be stuck with yet another substandard conservative on the Supreme Court…

 

I saw an article in the Guardian – most likely a paid PR piece – that wanted everyone to know that Jeff Bezos, of Amazon infamy, is apparently giving $2 Billion dollars to fight homelessness.  Oh, yay!  At least, that was my first reaction.  A split-second later, I decided that Bezos probably deserved some credit for the act.  A split-second after that, I realized that Bezos could do a LOT more to alleviate suffering if he would just pay the workers who do the work that produces all that beautiful lucre he hoards and doles out for credit a living wage.

They’re HIS employees.  THEIR work has created the wealth for which he takes all the credit – and rewards.  Pay the workers a fair wage and get them off of MY tax roles.  I don’t mind helping people who need help.  But I really don’t want to subsidize rich people who already have so much they don’t even know what to do with the money…but they KNOW, for sure, that if they have anything to say about it, they aren’t paying a living wage…

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Speaking of rich, self-serving scoundrels serving their own agendas and lying about it all the while, I’m sick of Facebook.  They’ve been telling the same story in response to scandal after scandal and it never changes.  “Oh,” they say, “we were slow to respond.  That’s on us.  We’ll do better in the future.”  This from a company that used the slogan ‘Move fast and break things.’

I think it’s time we stop waiting for the company to voluntarily do the right thing and go with a bit of regulation…

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I hope Rosenstein doesn’t resign…

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I believe Dr. Ford.  Trump says he stands by Kavanaugh.  Trump says Kavanaugh is a good man.  Based on the criminal elements Don Donald has completely surrounded himself with, Trump’s endorsement should be a warning, not a comfort.

For those keeping score, the list of Supreme Court Justice seats obtained through foul deeds is Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and soon, Brett Kavanaugh…

…because conservatives don’t like “activist judges”…

It’s common for the conservatives to get the early crowing so I’ve learned to wait a beat.  The most recent faux-row has the cons all up in arms in protest of a black man protesting unarmed people of color being gunned down by police.  So, they burn their shoes.  My guess is, these are shoes no longer worn or perhaps picked up at the local thrift store.  Nike’s stock plunged – initially.  That’s the early crowing.  But then?  Nike’s stock has reached an all time high.  Sure, certain conservatives think people of color should just take their shootings  with a “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” attitude but it looks to me like Nike got it right…

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Wow, President Snowflake sure did get upset by Bob Woodward’s new book, ‘Fear’, didn’t he?  Anything that paints him in a less-than A+ light (which means “anything true”) really upsets the guy.  He seems to have spent his entire privileged, protected life using the money his daddy gave him to whine and throw tantrums to get his way.  It seems he’s been convinced that this behavior “works” because, through most of his life, it has worked.  It looked like it might be working on the US as well – for a terrifying while.  But the cracks are forming…

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I had occasion to see a video of an interview with Russell Brand by the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman.  The clip I saw is about 10 minutes long and it’s a couple of years old but it’s a fascinating conversation.  Here’s a link.  Basically, Brand takes the position that the overall system has become so corrupt and out of balance that the inevitable result will be revolution.  I think history makes a strong case in support of that position.  Then he says he doesn’t vote, not just because of his conclusion but in an effort to speed the result along.  I think he should vote – for two reasons:

One, it’s the system we have.  I feel a little silly even taking this position.  I honestly believe that as long as electorates are forced to use electronic or computerized voting systems, we’re living in pseudo-democracies and the masses are NOT doing the “electing.”  We MUST use paper ballots so that the votes can be counted and recounted if necessary.  If the corrupt officials insist on the machines – and they do – then we use absentee ballots.  But we vote.  When we discover the systems are corrupt, we work to improve the systems from within – even if we believe we can’t win.  Because…

Two, revolutions are messy and unpredictable.  Oh, did I say “messy”?  I meant destructive and deadly.  Wreckage and ruin, death and destruction; these are the kinds of things people should be trying to avoid.  But they’re part and parcel to revolution.

Sure, wipe everything away and start again – this time better!  But will it be?  Look back through history.  Revolutions don’t always go the way the revolutionaries think they’re going to.  Remember the White Bolsheviks?  They teamed up with the Red Bolsheviks in the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” mold, then got wiped out by the Red Bolsheviks after the Tsar was gone.  Whoops.  What, too “foreign”?  Okay, a little closer to home, then.

The American Revolution would not have succeeded without help from the French.  Frenchmen were with us every step of the way.  They not only saw but participated in making the American Revolution play out the way the founders hoped it would: we formed a new democratic Republic and moved on (for a time) in the best interests of the masses.  Then the French, applying the model the Americans had just successfully used, tried their own revolution.  Their results were…different.

Having watched and participated in the American Revolution, they nevertheless couldn’t steer their own revolution dependably.  THEIR revolution became so bloody, history knows at least a portion of that time as “The Terror.”  THEIR revolution led to Napoleon and over a decade of war and death.

I’ll tell you this: It’s one thing to say one believes that revolution is inevitable.  It’s an entirely different thing to call it desirable…

Somewhere along the way, I realized there was a difference between a Democrat and a Progressive.  There’s not supposed to be but there it is – clear to anyone who cares to take a look.  The Democratic Party moved right, leaving Progressives behind.  Why?  The usual suspects: greed, money, power…

At turns I’ve felt isolated in my understanding but from time to time something happens to remind me that I’m not alone.  Recently, it was the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  This morning, it’s this piece in the Guardian by David Sirota.  It’s a good read.  He lays out the disconnect between Democratic rhetoric and Democratic actions quite well.  He makes a point I’ve made many times: “…liberal America’s pattern of electing corporate Democrats – rather than progressives – has been a big part of the problem that led to Trump and that continues to make America’s economic and political system a neo-feudal dystopia.”

The piece gave me hope because I realized while I was reading it that Progressives are doing to the Democratic Party what Libertarians did to the GOP – only saner.  The Libertarian Party has existed since 1971 but they were mostly – and correctly – dismissed as far-right, no-practical-application extremists.  They couldn’t get any traction with the mainstream conservatives.  So, they eventually packed up their far-right, no-practical-application “ideas” and registered as Republicans.  They ran as Republicans.  Eventually, they took over the Republican Party and Republicans have appeared cruel and insane ever since.

But the Progressives these days seem to have co-opted the idea (thank you, Bernie) and are running as Democrats, hopefully moving the party in the right – I guess I should say the correct direction.  It will take time but maybe not as much time as it took for the Libertarians to deconstruct the Republican Party.  Hope springs eternal, I guess…

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We’ve all heard of the Seven Deadly Sins but do you know what they actually are?  These days, it’s important to know because they’re living in the White House.  All of them.  They are Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, and Sloth.  Trump hits every one of them with perfect precision.  Every time he opens his mouth (or his Twitter feed) he reinforces his fealty to at least one of them.

If I were a religious man, I would be concerned about the anti-Christ.  According to Revelations 13:5, the anti-Christ will be allowed to exercise power for 42 months.  That’s three and a half years.  (Then things get ugly.)  Trump took power in January, 2017.  That puts the end of his reign at July, 2020.  I’m just sayin’…

Last week was pretty quiet, comparatively.  John McCain’s passing kept our National Embarrassment off the front pages.  His final, decent act.  Even in death, McCain out-maneuvered Trump.  Out-maneuvering Trump isn’t much of a trick, I know.  Hell, a squirrel could out-maneuver Trump.  But McCain did it dead!  You gotta respect that.  He didn’t just make the right squeaky noises like the rest of the GOP.  He didn’t have positions.  He had principles.  He was, I think, the last bulwark defending what’s left of America from the foil hat right.

I’m digressing a bit, here, but I used to enjoy debating various topics with my right-leaning brethren.  Then I became aware they were taking religious stands – that is, there was nothing, and I mean NOTHING, that could convince them to reconsider their unsupported assertions.  It’s the old, “God said it, I believe it and that settles it!” position except with ‘Fox and Fiends’ replacing God.  THEN I discovered – OMG – they were “with Q.”  Full-on conspiracy theorists.  Nuts.  It’s not fun debating them anymore.  I don’t think it’s ethical to pick on the disabled…

McCain didn’t play that game.  He did what he thought was right.  He wasn’t always.  He was part of the “Keating Five”, the bi-partisan group that set up the artificial housing bubble that crashed the Eighties and destroyed the Savings and Loan industry, replacing it with Credit Unions.  But that was just more right-wing “less regulation is better” bullshit.  I think McCain learned from his mistakes and, honestly, who can ask more from anybody than that?  Everyone makes mistakes.  The measure of intelligence is ‘how many times’…

I’m glad we get this weekend to savor the relative quiet of last week.  McCain cast the vote that kept the Affordable Care Act alive – for a little while longer, anyway.  Now I expect the GOP to eliminate it entirely.  It benefits Americans.  The GOP can’t have that.

I’ll tell you this: I don’t know who Doug Ducey (R), the current Governor of Arizona, will appoint in McCain’s place.  I don’t know much about Ducey.  Is he old-school, loyal-opposition GOP or the more modern disloyal-opposition, burn-it-to-the-ground GOP?  We’ll all find out together.  But either way, we’ll not see John McCain’s like again…

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In an effort to pretend Facebook has it’s users best interest at heart, they’re no longer allowing me to post automatically from my blog site directly to Facebook.  If I forget to manually post it, you might miss out.  It makes more sense, to me, to just go to my blog site – The Bacon Press (www.mybaconpress.com) <– that’s a link – and click on the little button at the bottom that says subscribe.  They’ll ask for an email address and it LOOKS like they’re asking you to “join” WordPress.  In truth, though, they just need the email so they can forward these little bits of (hey, you fill in the blank) directly to your inbox…