The Ramirez Smear Against Kavanaugh Exposes the Desperation of Democrats

Posted on | September 24, 2018 | 5 Comments

“This is a smear, plain and simple,” Judge Brett Kavanaugh said in response to the implausible claim by former Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez. It is remarkable — and a frightening testimony to the ongoing destruction of journalism standards — that the New Yorker was willing to publish this claim despite the fact that Ronan Farrow and Jane Meyer could find zero substantiation for Ramirez’s fable:

The New Yorker has not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party. The magazine contacted several dozen classmates of Ramirez and Kavanaugh regarding the incident. Many did not respond to interview requests; others declined to comment, or said they did not attend or remember the party. . . .
One of the male classmates who Ramirez said egged on Kavanaugh denied any memory of the party. “I don’t think Brett would flash himself to Debbie, or anyone, for that matter,” he said. Asked why he thought Ramirez was making the allegation, he responded, “I have no idea.” The other male classmate who Ramirez said was involved in the incident commented, “I have zero recollection.”
In a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved in the incident, the wife of a third male student she said was involved, and three other classmates, Dino Ewing, Louisa Garry, and Dan Murphy, disputed Ramirez’s account of events: “We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not. The behavior she describes would be completely out of character for Brett. In addition, some of us knew Debbie long after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett’s Supreme Court nomination was pending. Editors from the New Yorker contacted some of us because we are the people who would know the truth, and we told them that we never saw or heard about this.”
The former friend who was married to the male classmate alleged to be involved, and who signed the statement, said of Ramirez, “This is a woman I was best friends with. We shared intimate details of our lives. And I was never told this story by her, or by anyone else. It never came up. I didn’t see it; I never heard of it happening.” She said she hadn’t spoken with Ramirez for about ten years, but that the two women had been close all through college, and Kavanaugh had remained part of what she called their “larger social circle.”

The former friend suggests the accuser’s obvious motive to lie:

In an initial conversation with The New Yorker, she suggested that Ramirez may have been politically motivated. Later, she said that she did not know if this was the case.
Ramirez is a registered Democrat, but said that her decision to speak out was not politically motivated and, regarding her views, that she “works toward human rights, social justice, and social change.”

Translation: “I’m a Bolsehvik.”

What’s really happening here? It’s very simple: Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) decided to stop Kavanaugh by any means necessary. Once the unsubstantiated tale by Christine Blasey Ford was pronounced “credible” (because any accusation against Kavanaugh is “credible,” when that word becomes a synonym for politically useful) this was a signal to anyone else who wanted to make such a claim that they would be praised as a heroic “survivor of sexual assault” and treated favorably by the media for joining the pile-on. When Judge Kavanaugh calls this story “a smear, plain and simple,” he is describing not only Debrorah Ramirez’s fabricated tale, but also the decision of the New Yorker to publish it, which they never would do if it were aimed at a Democrat.

This is pure partisan politics, part of a carefully orchestrated campaign by Democrats to win the midterm elections. Nov. 6 is coming.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.

Category: Media Bias, Supreme Court

Rule 5 Sunday: Happy Birthday, Alysha Nett!

Posted on | September 24, 2018 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

L.A.- based model, photographer & TV reporter Alysha Nett has become pretty well known on Instagram with a lot of pics depicting her scantily clad and tatted-up body. It’s her birthday today, and since I’m continuing to lack inspiration (this moving business is more stress than I care for) she’s the only decent-looking gal who cropped up in today’s birthday list.

Alysha in the kitchen; apparently a lost brassiere is getting in the way of sandwich making.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #384, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. Animal Magnetism continues to deliver from the road with Rule Five Loony California Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL reports on Kavanaugh’s Accuser, Banning Roosh V, National Cheeseburger Day, National Pepperoni Pizza Day, Maria Elvira Salazar, Oktoberfest, and Fall Rule 5.

A View From The Beach overcomes his iPad to send us Queen of the Night, The End of Bikini Season is Nigh, Alas, If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Eat ‘Em, The Russiagate Strip Tease, “Iron Horse”, Last Emergency Post For A While, The Hazards of TV Reporting, Monday Morning Pick Me Up and Emergency Morning Post.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Imogen Poots, his Vintage Babe is Abby Dalton, and Sex in Advertising is covered this week by Lady Gaga. At Dustbury, it’s Tara Fitzgerald and Ségol?ne Royal.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Amazon Fashion – Jewelry For Women

Category: Rule 5

Parenting in the #MeToo Era

Posted on | September 23, 2018 | Comments Off on Parenting in the #MeToo Era

Megan Fox at PJMedia is a mother, with a young son, and she’s angry:

Mothers of sons everywhere should be terrified by the constant destruction of men by duplicitous, lying women and an overzealous and political Senate confirmation process. All a scheming broad has to do these days is claim that your son touched her inappropriately more than two decades ago and she can derail his career. . . .
The press has underestimated the mothers of America who are watching this process of destroying a good man with horror and anger. What can we do as mothers to make sure this doesn’t happen to our sons? It begins with training them from a young age to protect themselves from unscrupulous girls. A long time ago the worst you had to worry about was a girl trapping your son by getting pregnant. Now it’s much worse. . . . .

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

A few years ago — in 2013, during the second Anthony Weiner scandal — I found myself reading the Riot Act to my then-14-year-old son.

“Don’t ever do anything like that! ‘Dick pics’ from a member of Congress? All this ‘sexting’ stuff? This is crazy! The Internet never forgets, boy! Don’t ever write anything in an email or a text message you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times!”

The advent of the Social Media Age has caught adults unprepared for the consequences. Online lynch-mobs are constantly patrolling the Internet in search of their next victim, and many kids have not been adequately warned of the dangers of digital destruction. How many stories have we seen of young people going to prison on the basis of evidence found on their cellphones? It does not seem to occur to these young fools that the ubiquitous devices can be used, for example, to provide investigators with minute-by-minute data on their location, and that the electronic log of their calls and messages is also available as evidence.

A few years ago, we heard a lot about “cyberbullying,” with some kids being driven to suicide by tormentors on Facebook or other sites. And have we forgotten Steubenville? “The jocular attitude of the assailants was documented on Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and cell phone recordings of the acts,” to quote Wikipedia, and two 16-year-old boys were convicted of sex offenses as a result of that August 2012 incident.

Megan Fox offers some suggestions for parents to protect their sons from false accusations, and I would augment her list with two points:

Pair up — Get yourself a steady girlfriend, one who’s not too crazy, and avoid the random casual hookups that seem to be the most common context of destructive charges of sexual misconduct.
Don’t use text or email for personal conversation — Many young women seem to have the idea that their boyfriends have nothing better to do than to constantly monitor their phones and reply instantly to any message. It’s as if they’ve forgotten that phones can be used to, y’know, actually talk to people. Young guys foolishly cooperate with this routine of constant texting back and forth, and girls become accustomed to using their phones as a sort of remote-control device for manipulating their boyfriends.

So, the young man should limit his romantic activities to one girl, and put her on notice that he’s a busy man — he’s got places to go and people to see — who can’t be bothered to reply to every damned message on his phone. “You need to talk to me? Call me. Time is money, honey. If you got some kind of emotional issues, call a therapist, but that ain’t my job, woman. Now stop interrupting me with these silly messages.”

It is from the habit of using texting in a purely personal way that people get into the whole “sexting” business, wherein fools unwittingly create incriminating evidence against themselves. Anthony Weiner is the textbook example of where that kind of behavior can lead. The situation that has developed into the #MeToo witch-hunt arguably started with WeinerGate in 2011, which is when women first seemed to get the idea that social media can be used as a weapon of vengeance.

My son? The one I warned when he was 14? He’s been with the same girl since he was 15, and he doesn’t even have a Facebook account.

Get smart, kids. The life you save may be your own.

Category: Family

Left-Wing Lawyer Accuses Republican Senators of Bullying Kavanaugh Accuser

Posted on | September 22, 2018 | Comments Off on Left-Wing Lawyer Accuses Republican Senators of Bullying Kavanaugh Accuser

On the day in February 2017 when Jeff Sessions was confirmed as Attorney General, ABC News interviewed D.C. lawyer Debra Katz — identifying her only as a “protester” — as she declared: “We are going to fight back,. We are going to resist. We will not be silenced.” Debra Katz, whose enthusiasm for “LGBT Rights” is a matter of public record, is a member of the anti-Trump resistance and is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the attorney for Judge Brett Kavnaugh’s accuser. Friday, as a 10 p.m. deadline for Christine Blasey Ford to agree to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee neared, Katz became hysterical:

“Your cavalier treatment of a sexual assault survivor who has been doing her best to cooperate with the Committee is completely inappropriate,” Debra Katz, an attorney for Ford wrote to the committee leadership staff Friday evening. . . .
“The 10:00 p.m. deadline is arbitrary. Its sole purpose is to bully Dr. Ford and deprive her of the ability to make a considered decision that has life-altering implications for her and her family,” Katz wrote. “She has already been forced out of her home and continues to be subjected to harassment, hate mail, and death threats. Our modest request is that she be given an additional day to make her decision.”
Even with the extension granted, it appears the contentious back-and-forth could continue even spilling into next week, delaying Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote further.
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee and attorneys for Ford have for days discussed the terms of Ford’s testimony.
Ford offered a list of 10 demands, Grassley said, and the committee was willing to meet “halfway,” calling some of her demands “unreasonable.”

People who are beginning to suspect that Professor Ford’s accusation is “a flimsy smear-job,” to quote myself, will be inclined to ask, if this accusation is so “credible,” why does it seem the accuser is reluctant to testify? Doesn’t it appear that the whole point of this exercise is to obstruct the confirmation process? “We are going to resist,” Debra Katz promised at that February 2017 protest, and this is the #Resistance.

Late last night, committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley granted the anti-heterosexual #Resistance lawyer another 24 hours to agree to terms for her client’s testimony. Notice how, in her email to the committee, Katz asserted as a matter of fact that Professor Ford is “a sexual assault survivor,” and further asserted that Professor Ford is “doing her best to cooperate.” Many people are beginning to suspect that neither of these things is true, and that in fact Professor Ford never expected to be compelled to defend this flimsy smear-job in a public forum:

“Christine Blasey Ford is the Eric Clanton of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. You morons remember Clanton, don’t you? He was the antifa pussy who clubbed a Trump supporter with a bike lock, and I say pussy because just look at the video: He’s hanging in the back of the crowd, then suddenly bursts out in front, hits the guy when he isn’t looking, and disappears back into the crowd. Clanton obviously didn’t expect any consequences for his cowardly attack, but hadn’t counted on being tracked down and identified by 4chan. And it’s the same with Ford. She expected to just toss in a stink bomb and then disappear back into anonymity as just another #MeToo victim. And the Democrats expected the GOP to just flop like the Cleveland Browns late in the season and that would be that. . . .”

Far be it from me to call Professor Ford a liar, but the way she went about this — sending a letter to Dianne Feinstein, who said the accuser “strongly requested confidentiality [and] declined to come forward or press the matter further” — suggests that this was indeed a sneaky attack that Professor Ford hoped she could get away with behind the mask of anonymity. Just like Eric Clanton and his bike lock.

Eric Clanton attacked Trump supporters in Berkeley.

Some readers may remember that, after online activists ID’d Clanton as the bike-lock attacker, he claimed victimhood, saying people were “smearing and threatening me online,” which “created stress” for him. As if the Trump supporters who got bashed on the head with a heavy steel bike-lock suffered no stress? Quite similarly, Professor Ford says she is now suffering harassment because of her attack on Judge Kavanaugh, but who is responsible for this situation? Who decided it was a good idea to send this poison-pen letter to Sen. Feinstein? And who let this leak to the media? It wasn’t Republicans who did this. Feinstein was circulating this smear-job among Democrats on Capitol Hill, who were talking about it with their media buddies, long before she went public with it Sept. 13.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial about where this #MeToo approach to accusations of sexual misconduct is leading us:

The core tenet of Anglo-American law is that the burden of proof always rests with the person making the accusation. An accuser can’t doom someone’s freedom or career merely by making a charge.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Any American with the least bit of common sense — a category that excludes Democrat voters — has to be horrified by what Professor Ford attempted to do to Judge Kavanaugh. Here was a man against whom no such accusation of sexual impropriety had ever been made, and yet all this woman had to do was to send a confidential letter to a Democrat Senator, and now everyone (including some so-called “conservatives”) is talking about how “credible” her accusation is. All it takes is one anonymous accuser, by this #MeToo standard, and a man’s reputation and career are destroyed, because of something that allegedly happened at a house party more than 35 years ago? Dear God!

Perhaps some will criticize me for describing Professor Ford’s attorney Debra Katz as “anti-heterosexual” merely because she seems so enthusiastic about “LGBT Rights,” with the implication that Ms. Katz’s interest in such issues is personal. Well, isn’t my suspicion “credible”? If we are expected to impose a verdict of guilt on Judge Kavanaugh based solely on this accusation made by Ms. Katz’s client, why aren’t we allowed to speculate about the motives of Ms. Katz’s role in the “resistance”?

Republican Senators play by the rules of decorum and civility, but I’m just a damned blogger, you see. Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules.

You want a fight? We’re going to fight by street rules, and I’m not going to hesitate to use any weapons within reach. Smash my beer bottle on the bar and slash your neck with the jagged glass — that’s the way I’m fighting this bar-room brawl, and the responsibility for the bloodshed rests with those who chose to inaugurate hostilities.

“Talk thus to the marines, but not to me,” as Sherman replied to Hood.

War to knife, knife to the hilt — this is what you can expect, when you believe politics entitles you to do anything you please, including such a cruel and heinous libel as Ms. Katz’s client has committed.

In the absence of any corroborating evidence, we can only conclude that Professor Ford is a liar, whose unjust defamation of Judge Kavanaugh was motivated by the spiteful sentiments of partisan politics. Let the talking-heads on TV keep blathering on about how “credible” this accusation is, and how it needs to be taken seriously, but nobody can force me to play that “civility” game in the middle of bar-room brawl.

Democrats are desperate to stop Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and they’re desperate to win the midterm elections. Nov. 6 is coming.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.

Category: Senate, Supreme Court

In The Mailbox: 09.21.18

Posted on | September 22, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: #FreeJamesWoods – Twitter Goes On The Offensive
Twitchy: Ted Cruz Gets In A Zinger During The “Say Something Nice About Your Opponent” Phase Of Senate Debate
Louder With Crowder: These Womens’ Comments On Brett Kavanaugh Shock CNN
According To Hoyt: When Every Boy Is Guilty, Girls Become Monsters
Monster Hunter Nation: The WALL OF FLAME Challenge!!!
Vox Popoli: The Most Pyrrhic Victory In History

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling Of The American Mind, also, How The U.S. Senate Became A Campus Kangaroo Court
American Thinker: The Alinsky-ization Of Brett Kavanaugh
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Loony California Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For September 21
Da Tech Guy: Will The NHGOP Flip One House Seat Or Two? also, If You Want To Understand Why I Think The “Blue Wave” Is BS
Don Surber: Trump Brought Them Home, also, “Yeah, I Got A Magic Wand”
Dustbury: Whatever That Ocean’s Called
First Street Journal: Public School Teachers Aren’t Underpaid – They Make More Than The Taxpayers Supporting Them
The Geller Report: Newton Public School Teacher Vows To Increase Proselytizing For Islam, also, Italy’s Interior Minister Keeps Election Promise, Begins Deporting Migrants
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, Our Betters, and Bonus Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
JustOneMinute: Friday Afternoon
Legal Insurrection: NYT Claims Rosenstein Offered To Tape Trump, Discuss Invoking 25th Amendment With Cabinet, also, Report Says Mueller’s Team Has A Very Close Relationship With The Press
The PanAm Post: Better Binational War Than Multinational Intervention
Power Line: Grassley Responds To Ford’s Demands, also, Deep State Outed…By The NYT?
Shark Tank: Will Florida Become A Sanctuary State Under Gillum?
Shot In The Dark: Now This Is #Resistance
The Political Hat: Trump’s Greatest Asset, Redux
This Ain’t Hell: National POW/MIA Recognition Day, also, Marine Barracks Jarheads Saving The World
Victory Girls: It’s Not Fear But Opportunism That Drives Blasey Ford
Volokh Conspiracy: Criminal Libel Prosecution – Under A Statute Struck Down 30 Years Ago
Weasel Zippers: Actor Jack Black Pops Off About President Trump At Walk Of Fame Ceremony, also, Rite Aid Shooter Snochia Moseley Identified As Transgender
Mark Steyn: Deep & Deeper

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Category: Linkagery

What Does ‘Credible’ Mean in 2018?

Posted on | September 21, 2018 | 5 Comments

Ever since Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser told her tale to the Washington Post, I’ve repeatedly seen the word “credible” used to describe her accusation. “It would hurt the legitimacy of the Supreme Court,” said Sarah Quinlan of Red State, “to force a confirmation through when there appears to be a serious and credible accusation without an attempt to investigate the claims.” And even Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie — scarcely the kind of guy I’d expect to join a “we must believe the women” stampede — joined in on the lynch-mob rhetoric: “Following a late-breaking, credible accusation of a sexual assault that allegedly occurred in the early 1980s, when future Judge Kavanaugh was in high school, the outcome of his confirmation proceedings is far from clear.” It behooves us to ask, by what standard is it “credible”?

Or is “credible” now a synonym for suspicious and possibly partisan?

Prior to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s decision to drop this stink-bomb into the Supreme Court confirmation process, there was not the slightest suggestion — not even by Judge Kavanaugh’s fiercest critics — that he was a man of lecherous reputation. While Democrats generally deplored Judge Kavanaugh’s conservative judicial philosophy, and made a lot of noise about the unavailability of his correspondence while he served as an aide to President George W. Bush, no one even hinted that there was any shadow over his personal life. So it would be contrary to his known character for the teenage Kavanaugh to have been “stumbling drunk” at a 1982 house party. as Christine Blasey Ford claims, and still more out of character for him to have sexually assaulted her.

Oh, but it’s a “credible accusation,” we’re told, although I can’t understand what aspect of it makes it “credible.” Was it widely known that Kavanaugh made a habit of heavy drinking while attending Georgetown Prep? Can someone point me to such a report, prior to Thursday, Sept. 13? Maybe I missed something, but I don’t remember reading any such story. Certainly, there was nothing — zero, zilch, nada — to suggest that Brett Kavanaugh has ever been regarded as a sexual predator, until Professor Ford made this accusation.

No, Brett Kavanaugh was a top student, ultimately a cum laude graduate of Yale University, and do we expect straight-A students to be “stumbling drunk” at parties, manhandling every girl within reach?

Meanwhile, the prep school young Miss Blasey attended was apparently a hotbed of drunkenness and degeneracy, and why are we supposed to believe she can perfectly remember everything that happened on a certain night in 1982, if she was boozing it up with the other girls from Holton-Arms School? But it’s a “credible accusation,” they say.

When the story broke last week, my initial reaction was to think, “Wow, Democrats are really desperate.” And then when Professor Ford told her story to the Post, my reaction was: “So what? Drunk teenage preppies gone wild.” Even if we stipulate, as a hypothetical, that some sort of encounter took place between a “stumbling drunk” 17-year-old Kavanaugh and a 15-year-old Miss Blasey, this was more than 35 years ago, and was probably not the sort of trauma-inducing incident it was portrayed as being. But that was a last-ditch defense — a fallback position — and the fighting on the front-line ramparts had barely just begun.

Judge Kavanaugh has flatly denied the accusation twice and, so far, we do not even have any evidence that young Kavanaugh and young Miss Blasey were ever simultaneously at any such party as she has described. Ed Whelan got himself into a mess this week with some very interesting speculation about how this could have been a case of mistaken identity. Yet while Whelan got spanked hard for that, the Wall Street Journal reported that Professor Ford “can’t recall in whose home the alleged assault took place, how she got there, or how she got home that evening.”

Why is everybody telling us that this is a “credible accusation”? Because, in the #MeToo age, it’s considered sexist to imply that a woman making such an accusation might not be credible. No matter how sketchy the story may be, or how obvious the possible motive to lie, you’re complicit in “rape culture” if you say, “Hey, this looks like a flimsy smear job.”

There’s a 10 p.m. ET deadline for Professor Ford to respond to the offer to testify next week, otherwise Mitch McConnell is prepared to bring the Kavanaugh nomination to a vote.

Mitch is all out of bubblegum, you see.

Category: Senate, Supreme Court

Analysis: True

Posted on | September 21, 2018 | Comments Off on Analysis: True

President Donald Trump in Las Vegas:

“I’m angry at Democrats because of what they do to our country. Today’s Democratic Party is held hostage by left-wing haters, angry mobs, socialist fanatics, deep-state bureaucrats and their fake-news allies. Except for a lot of the fake news that you see from these people back here, this is an incredible time for our country. America is winning again. America is being respected again.”

This is exactly right. The Democrats are “held hostage” by these interest groups and, despite what anyone on CNN might tell you, this is “an incredible time for our country”:

The American economy added 201,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.9 percent.
Economists had forecast 191,100 new jobs and the unemployment rate falling to 3.8 percent.
Average hourly earnings increased 2.9 percent for the month on an annualized basis, according to a Department of Labor report released Friday. That also beat expectations for 2.7 percent wage growth. In dollar terms, average hourly earnings increased 10 cents from the previous month to $27.16.

The only thing that can stop this amazing economy expansion is if “socialist fanatics” take over Congress. You can prevent that.

November 6 is coming.

Category: Donald Trump, Economics, Election