Monday, October 01, 2018

The nonsense from the Senate Judiciary Committee continues

spca


 
  
 As for the money wasting by the Senate Judiciary Committee . . . We do not need an investigation by the FBI.  It is not going to produce anything more.  The alleged incident is a cold case, how about that.  I agree with Ann "No FBI Investigation."  

 

An expanded FBI background check of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has begun under terms laid down by the Trump White House and the Senate Republican leadership, who agreed on Friday to a one-week probe in order to secure a party-line vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee to approve his nomination. The Republicans plan to bring the matter to the Senate floor for a vote some time next week.
After Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona threatened to block the nomination, a bipartisan deal was negotiated in which Senate Democrats agreed to support a limited FBI investigation into 36-year-old allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh, now an Appeals Court judge.
The Judiciary Committee then approved Kavanaugh’s nomination by an 11-10 vote, with Flake voting in favor. The FBI will report its findings to the White House, which will forward them to the Senate.
There were objections from the Democratic side to the limits set on the probe, apparently by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other leading Republicans. The FBI will interview Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before the Judiciary Committee Thursday during the all-day hearing on her claims that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party in suburban Maryland when she was 15 years old and he was 17.
The FBI will also interview several others identified as possible witnesses to the assault or to the party, including Mark Judge, the friend of Kavanaugh whom Ford identified as an accomplice in the assault. The FBI will also interview Deborah Ramirez, who claimed Kavanaugh engaged in improper sexual conduct while a student at Yale University in the mid-1980s, but not Julie Swetnick, who made the most sweeping allegations of sexual misconduct, including that Kavanaugh and Judge were at least passive bystanders to her “gang rape” by a group of teenage boys during the early 1980s.
None of these allegations surfaced during previous background checks of Kavanaugh, including when he joined the staff of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in 1993, when he joined the Bush White House staff in 2001, and when he was nominated and confirmed to the US Court of Appeals in 2006 after a three-year conflict in Congress, where Democrats initially blocked his appointment.
A Trump administration official told the Wall Street Journal that the reopening of the FBI investigation into Kavanaugh was being handled “as any update to a background investigation would be handled if new, derogatory information is introduced.” The FBI will not convene a grand jury or be able to compel witness statements, meaning that those who do not wish to speak to the agency can simply decline to do so.
 
 
We don’t need this.  And if we’re going to do this, we need to do it with Juanita Broaddrick as well (she has stated that Bill Clinton raped her). 
 
Lastly, you have to read Ava and C.I.’s “TV: MURPHY BROWN was bad but Channing Dungey's far worse.”  I pronounced it amazing last night.  Jim liked it but really didn’t seem to get it.  I called him this morning to ask how it was doing?  It has already had 250,000 views and it is not even 24 hours online yet.  It’s amazing.
 


This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Monday:

 
Monday, October 1, 2018. The KRG held elections and much more.

Let's start with some good news.  Neera Tanden finally found the man of her political dreams.  For years, people would caution her, "Neera, be practical.  You're just not impressive enough to land Satan."  But Neera had her heart set on being the First Lady in Hell and now, thanks to her merger with Bill Kristol, she's as close to that position as she's ever been.  Caitlin Johnstone (CONSORTIUM NEWS) reports:

  In a conference at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, “Resistance” leader and professional left-puncher Neera Tanden met with Iraq-raping neocon Bill Kristol to discuss bipartisanship and shared values. While leprechauns held hands and danced beneath candy rainbows and gumdrop Reaper drones, the duo engaged in a friendly, playful conversation with the event’s host in a debate format which was not unlike watching the Pillsbury Doughboy have a pillow fight with himself in a padded room after drinking a bottle of NyQuil.
To get the event started, the host whose name I refuse to learn asked the pair to discuss briefly what common ground such wildly different people could possibly share to make such a strange taboo-shattering dialogue possible.
“Issues around national security and believing in democratic principles as they relate to foreign policy,” replied Tanden. “And opposing authoritarianism, and opposing the kind of creeping populism that undermines democracy itself.”
Neera Tanden, in case you are unaware, is a longtime Clinton and Obama insider and CEO of the plutocrat-backed think tank Center for American Progress. Her emails featured prominently in the 2016 Podesta drops by WikiLeaks, which New Republic described as revealing “a pattern of freezing out those who don’t toe the line, a disturbing predilection for someone who is a kind of gatekeeper for what ideas are acceptable in Democratic politics.” Any quick glance at Tanden’s political activism and Twitter presence will render this unsurprising, as she often seems more concerned with attacking the Green Party and noncompliant progressive Democrats than she does with 
advancing progressive values. Her entire life is dedicated to keeping what passes for America’s political left out of the hands of the American populace.
Kristol co-signed Tanden’s anti-populist rhetoric and her open endorsement of neoconservative foreign policy, and went on to say that another thing he and Tanden have in common is that they’ve both served in government, which makes you realize that nothing’s black and white and everything’s kinda nebulous and amorphous so it doesn’t really matter if you, say for example, help deceive your country into a horrific blunder that ends up killing a whole lot of people for no good reason.


Following the above PDA, Tanden and Kristol are said to have retired to the two-star American Inn & Suites in Orange, California -- the cheapest accommodations near Yorba Linda and the Richard Nixon War Criminal Library and Museum -- which is where the two-some plan to hold both their reception and their first animal sacrifice.  Remember, boys and girls, the happy couple is registered at fetish stores near you.

Not sure whether The Problem From Hell Samantha Power was the couple's matron of honor or their handmaid, but she did crawl out from under her rock to Tweet.

 4 minutes ago

You mean like you guys with Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Maidan, Kosovo...

Russia likes sovereignty, except that of Ukraine, Estonia, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, the United Kingdom, the United States...
1 reply10 retweets33 likes






I guess he told her.  I don't think people have laughed so hard at Samantha Power since those wedding photos.

Meanwhile, the KRG held elections Sunday.


 4 hours ago

Draw media's approximate breakdown of the seats the political parties gained in 30 September : 40-42, 21-23, 11-13, New Generation: 7-9, : 7-8, 5-6.
3 retweets14 likes






Like their hero and former leader, the party of Jalal Talabani just can't get it up which is why the PUK still can't come in first place.  If the results hold, this will be an improvement over third place to Gorran but long gone are the days when Kurds flocked to the Talabani's PUK.  Not even 80% of the votes have been counted so these numbers are not complete and things remain fluid.  KDP spokespeople are stating that they have 45 seats but, again, these numbers can change.  The results thus far appear to have sent Gorran into silence.



  1.  5 hours ago

movement’s media expressed their joy after the polls ended and counting started, claiming that they have gained a big victory, but later they stopped covering results when they found out they were wrong.
1 like





Talabani hand-puppet Joel Wing looks at the early results and the KDP having won twice the seats as the PUK to insist that this means "the KDP - PUK domination" will continue.  The results thus far indicate only KDP domination.



  1.  4 hours ago

: Latest result on the Kurdistan Region's Parliamentary Election
For updates, follow here:

1 reply4 retweets16 likes






Only the anti-Barzani nut job Joel Wing could look at the current results and see good news for Talabani's PUK.  Some early results are showing the KDP with 46% of the votes and the PUK with 17%.  The PUK is not dominating anything.  That's why they started their usual crap of "voter fraud!" before the UN told them to knock it off.  Joel Wing has been either an idiot or a liar when it comes to the KRG repeatedly.  Wasn't it 2012 when he was telling us that Massoud Barzani had lost all support?  Bless crazy Joel Wing and the corporate press that props his tired ass up.



This morning on NPR's MORNING EDITION, Jane Arraf was hitting the crack pipe as she insisted
"the interesting thing is there are opposition parties."  She then goes on to call Gorran an older party.  Gorran, created by CIA seed-money does not have a long history.  "We did not see a lot of people," Arraf insisted of the one polling place that they went to in the morning and stayed all day.  It's really great that she can go to one polling place out of all the polling places in the three provinces -- not "regions," NPR -- and feels she can extrapolate from there.

Extrapolate?  I'm being kind and using it in place of "lying."

Jane always speaks for the prime minister -- whomever that is.  So this is a really hard time for her as Hayder al-Abadi is supposed to be on his way out and no one has emerged yet to be considered the new prime minister.  Poor, Jane.  It was so much easier when she was at CNN and could just broadcast whatever Saddam Hussein wanted her to.

One thing that is known about the elections yesterday:





  1.  57 minutes ago

's [journalist who was assassinated in 2013 in Kalar] widow Shirin Amin, will be a new MP of faction at the parliament. .
2 retweets11 likes







Yesterday, Isaiah's "Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Barbra Clones" and "Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Hogwarts" and Kat's  "Kat's Korner: Ann Wilson sings of and for the boys" and  "Kat's Korner: Cher gives us another classic" went up.  New content at THIRD:





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