We can see one reason why we can’t trust polls from these two headlines:
The Hill: “More Americans oppose Kavanaugh nomination amid partisan rancor.”
AOL: “Nearly two-thirds of voters believe Kavanaugh should be confirmed if the FBI finds no corroboration of the charges.”
We can’t trust polls because they are made to be spun.
The Harvard Center for American Political Studies /Harris Poll online survey of 1,330 registered voters was conducted September 29 to 30. The partisan breakdown is 37 percent Democrat, 32 percent Republican, 29 percent independent and 2 percent other. The full poll isn’t out yet, but here are some results, with my comments.
- 37 percent of registered voters want their Senators to give Kavanaugh’s nomination the thumbs up, while 44 percent want their Senators to vote against him. But 18 percent of respondents are undecided.
And, apparently, a lot of those surveyed didn’t watch the hearings, don’t know that Dr. Ford’s accusations are unsubstantiated, and almost certainly haven’t read the report of the Committees expert prosecutor, who found them dubious based on her testimony. Thanks, Biased Mainstream Media! But the truth will out…
- 44% of men per cent want their senators to vote in favor and another 44% wanting them to vote against Kavanaugh. Among female voters, 44% want Senators to vote against confirming Kavanaugh, while 31% want him confirmed. 24% remain undecided.
Yes, more women are unfair and biased on this nomination. But who wouldn’t want to install a cultural norm where your gender was regarded as automatically unimpeachable, no matter who you accused. with or without evidence?
- 45% of independents currently “don’t back their Senators confirming Kavanaugh,” compared to 28% who want him confirmed.
That’s how The Hill puts it, which is why you can’t trust second hand descriptions of polls, either. “Don’t back their Senators confirming Kavanaugh” now, or ever?
- 60% of Americans believe that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed if the FBI finds no corroboration of the charges.
That’s encouraging, I suppose, in the “A poll of my Facebook friends would apparently be about 5%” sense. Imagine: 40% of Americans want Kavanaugh rejected even if the accusations by Dr, Ford are completely unsubstantiated. Of course, many of them, if not most, wanted him rejected even before Ford’s re-discovered memories were leaked to the press.
- Nearly two-thirds of voters, 63%, believe Kavanaugh will ultimately be confirmed.
…meaning at least that many think that the FBI will turn up nothing new, and that Senator Susan Collins and Jeff Flake have some guts and decency. I’m pretty sure about the former, not at all sure about the latter.
- About 3/4 of those polled believe Sen. Dianne Feinstein should have immediately turned over the letter from Ford instead of holding it for over two months.
…meaning that about 25% are corrupted beyond hope, OR, like me, believe that Ford’s accusations never should have been taken into consideration at all.
- 66% of Americans support Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake’s insistence upon a limited FBI investigation before the final vote, 80% of Democrats, 69% of Independents, but only 45% of Republicans.
Democrats…anything that increases the chances that the vote will be delayed. Independents: Suckers for Jeff Flake’s alleged bi-partisanship, which in this case may just be more of his anti-Trump trolling. No, I no longer trust the motives of Senator Flake. Republicans: a lot believe that Kavanaugh has been tortured long enough. He has—too long—but there’s no down-side of the FBI investigation. It’s not as if Ford left many leads to investigate.
I want to see the whole poll and the exact questions, but I think I see here evidence that the Democrats may suffer for their despicable treatment of Brett Kavanaugh. I sure hope they do.
Ethics Alarms 
Assuming the FBI turns up nothing new, which I’m pretty sure they won’t, what do you think are the chances that he will still get confirmed? I have almost no faith that any Democrat, even Joe Manchin, will break ranks, Schumer’s got the party shut tight. Will Lisa Murkowski bow to Planned Parenthood and vote no? Will Susan Collins vote yes once she has the “cover” of the investigation? And if so, will Jeff Flake finally vote no with all kinds of rhetoric, but really just to spite the president?
They’ve already started spinning by complaining that the FBI investigation is limited and not an open-ended fishing expedition. So when it ends and turns up nothing new, they’ll just attack its credibility and be back to square 1.
No, they won’t. Because the vote is going to be held. The GOP knows that the idea has been to stall all along.
You have more faith in (sorry, Jack) RINOs than I have.
The Establishment Elite (aka The Swamp) likes the status quo, and a conservative leaning SCOTUS will block many of their power grabs.
Impossible to tell. But the red state Democratic Senators will be taking a huge risk to vote against him.
Claire McCaskill has already said she’s voting no, and Heidi Heitkamp has implied she will be voting no, although she hasn’t said as much. Donnelly is a no. Bill Nelson is a no. Chuck Schumer has probably made it very clear that no one gets a pass on this vote, because this is the most important vote of all for a generation. OK, it was all right to vote for Gina Aspell as CIA director, and it was ok to break ranks on taxes, but allowing the Supreme Court to tilt right and make Ted Kennedy’s speech about Robert Bork a reality is something no one is allowed to break ranks on. If it takes a Democratic senator or two down, then they are just going to have to accept that they are casualties of this all-important fight. Sanders and Casey came out against him on the first day.
I think this is all going to boil down to whether Murkowski and Collins can be swayed one way or the other, and whether Jeff Flake hates the president enough to torpedo his nominee on his way out the door. If John McCain were still in the picture Kavanaugh would be dead in the water, because you know he’d vote against him just as a “screw you, Mr. President.”
The polls in both ND and Mo. indicate that these Senators are losing ground because of their anti-K positions. Obviously, they can change their minds.I would not be surprised to see it.
I would. I’m sure Chuck has said it’s either fall on your sword or be branded forever as the woman who betrayed her sisterhood.
Ah, but Chuck isn’t the one who is going to be out of a job come November. Nothing sharpens the mind of a career politician like the terrifying possibility of having to get a real job.
Preliminary Disclaimer:
I did not see/hear the entirety of the testimony.
In all the analyses I have seen, I have not seen people make this distinction:
Is it true?
Does it matter?
I don’t like these late allegations. I did not like the Anita Hill fiasco. I don’t like this, either.
Is it true? Maybe. I thought she was “credible” in the sense that she was sincere.
I thought BK was credible too.
I did not think either of them were lying.
But, there was something “off” about her testimony. For an educated person, she seemed befuddled by simple questions (I am thinking about the “on behalf of” or “behest” line of questions, as well as her confusion about the need for a lawyer). I believe she was sincere and honest; I question her accuracy.
BK was also vehement in his denial. His vehemence is consistent with: 1) the entitled offender his detractors depict him to be; or 2) someone wrongfully accused.
I personally did not get the impression either was lying.
Where do we go from there? If he is telling the truth, he should be confirmed. If she is mistaken, he should be confirmed.
However, what if she is accurate? What if it was him? Then you get to the question:
Does it matter?
No. A juvenile offense that was not prosecuted, or otherwise proven, should have no bearing here. Had he been prosecuted and adjudicated a juvenile, it should not have an impact on his professional career. It would not be a crime (making numerous assumptions about juvenile law across space and time). If it does not keep him out of law school, it should not hamper his professional advancement in any way.
His adult behavior st Yale may be different, but, again, if it does not prevent his admission to the bar, it should not prevent his professional advancement in any way. Again, this is a remote claim, brought late. Does it matter? No. Not to his fitness.
His outburst at Klobuchar? Justified! If you think this is a fancy job interview, she arguably violated the ADA by asking questions about a potential disability. I would have thrown that in her face. (Don’t even ask what a reasonable accommodation for alcoholics in the workplace might be. We lawyers have already figured that out.)
In principle, I do not object to the delay, based upon the desire of certain Senators to satisfy their need for information in order to fulfill their duties to advise and consent. I don’t think it is necessary, but they have the burden to fulfill it. (If I were BK, I would have answered those Senators who asked if he supported a full FBI investigation that it was not his job to tell him how they should do their job and the Third Branch has a Political Question doctrine that forbids him from doing so. However, that answer may disqualify him on certain future cases.)
All in all, whether the allegations are true (and I did not think either were deceitful), I do not believe her allegations matter. Of course, now, if you think he was lying, that would be relevant. If he had said he did it, but he has grown, that would be one thing. He denied it. If you believe he is lying, because of bias or not, lying under oath last week would matter.
I just don’t have a good reason to think he did.
It seems like something happened to her; I am not persuaded that he did it.
Take it for what you will.
-Jut
This is substantially my position as well.
You have convinced me of the error of my ways (substantially).
-Jut
I saw a small part of Ford’s testimony, and none of Kavanaugh. The 30 minutes or so I watched was excruciating for me. To me, she came across as being slow, dull, simpering, and easily manipulated. Granted, I only saw a small slice of her testimony, so my judgement can only be based on a part rather than the whole, but it was awful.
I kept thinking that as an educated, seemingly intelligent woman, her performance was childish. Hair in her face, confused by simple questions, unable to answer questions without help from her lawyers. I found myself actually angry at how she was portraying women overall. At one point when she was confused about the fear of flying questions, I found myself thinking “Oh come on, really?!” For me, nothing about her was credible, mostly just offensive to intelligent women everywhere.
I think both of them, in different ways, were indeed lying.
By putting BK in such a position, he was forced to mildly lie. One example: he probably drank more heavily than he could admit and not compromise himself, given the situation. They put him in a position of having to lie (to fib if you will) as any senator and indeed any person in a similar situation would, with all the hard work of their entire lives on the line, to reveal not the entire, honest truth, but a somewhat spun version.
People with mental problems, and about 1/3rd of American women (so it seems), are just now *hallucinating* and projecting on BK what this terrible masculine world has done to them. The whole nation is caught in the grip of absurdities, insofar as American culture, through film and other means, has become a porn-culture. For example, *you* undress underage girls all the time and show them in suggestive poses on billboards and in print media all across the nation. In this and a thousand different ways, each can be illustrated, *you* have become a nation of sexual perverts and it gets worse with every passing day. Fact.
This is mind-f**k territory. By openly presenting this imagery, *you* seduce people at a very basic level, and then condemn them when they show themselves too weak to resist the seductive suggestion or the cloying image.
Women, in my view, and of course analyzing my own self, are significantly assaulted and tremendously confused by these cultural events and this progression into open perversity. The implications *for us* are extreme. I will suggest that, at a psychological level, there is a profound anger that is directed to what is understood to be the *source* of the problem, and that is men’s appetite and men’s inclinations. This is also just a fact. I regret to inform that so much hinges on men and what attitude they have and what they allow themselves to do. If family and *true* respect for a woman is not at the very core of general social ethics, I suggest that this is one of the primary sources for social breakdown and out of it arises a whole range of problems. ‘Take care of the boys … and the girls will take care of themselves’. But the problems arise in the boys. They have to know this. And they cannot give their power over to women, as they have done. But they have to truly handle power, and they don’t.
Within that madness, within a culture that is in the process of going mad, and as I say within a pornographic culture which is careening out of control on these levels, it must be understood that the Furies will appear.
You have certainly read Aeschylus and know of Orestes’ plight with the Erinyes ‘those goddesses of vengeance and retribution who punished men for crimes against the natural order’. Perhaps my view is simplistic, but I do tend to think that *chthonic* forces rise up out of the social and psychological body. I have an example from a ‘popular cultural artifact’ that illustrates my point:
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsTK2LHZKPQ ]
The madness in the present will not abate anytime soon. Things careening out of control generally tend to crash! But the roots of present illness can be traced back through their causal chain.
I think Ford is lying. I think she sees her lie — an exaggeration at best, a sort of hallucination common to mentally unstable people — as an important truth within the context of the present.
That is how many many women are *relating* to this and they reveal, then, the profoundly psychological nature of the mass-hysteria. They do what women have done and will always do: they are interpreting through their emotions. And their emotions are very very unsettled.
In this sense, if you will permit me such an odd association, I see Kavanaugh as an Orestes-like figure. True, he has not killed his mother for vengeance, but yet the Furies attack him for a range of crimes against the natural order. He is Orestes-like in the sense that American and Western culture generally, to recover itself, has to confront woman, and certainly the out-of-control and rebellious woman of the present day. The social Clytemnestra is perhaps how I might put it? It is a strange time of reckoning. All the chickens … and goblins … and many other strange creatures … are coming home to roost.
And it will not end anytime soon…
I was referring strictly to the incident in question with that comment. Did he assault her? She says yes; he says no. I am not convinced either are lying about THAT.
-Jut
Obviously, I am more interested in the larger, surrounding questions and issues.
This might interest you though, if you take the times to watch such things: [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGxr1VQ2dPI&t=414s ] I don’t know the degree to which something like this is reliable, but it made a certain sense to me.
Just curious…if Kavanaugh was considered to be pro-abortion, would any of these accusations have seen the light of day?
Easy one. Of course not.
Given what happened to Senator Al Franken I am not so sure that even supporting abourtion would have made a difference. But then we willl never know becauause Kavanaugh would not have been considered for the Court
Yep, always remind yourself, the central doctrine of the religious Left is the killing of the unborn. If that is threatened, it is a no holds barred dig in and die on the hill battle.
I can see a political platform favoring the slaughter of the babies, but to make it an absolute no compromise plank of the platform? That’s kind of scary and a bit unnerving.
But, there’s a 2nd reason the Left is in full rabid mode right now, and in the realm of the Judiciary, may even temporarily outweigh the Left’s desire for unfettered liberty to kill their children in utero. That is with a 5th Justice on the Court that is more than likely to consult the Constitution before ruling, Leftist judicial activism to circumvent the Legislatures will be hampered for at least a decade. That, among their central pillars upon which they operate, could delay their agenda.
But, the irresponsible handlers of the Left wing laity know that Roe isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and haven’t told the laity. So we’re left with assuming the handlers benefit from the chaos being sown.
I suspect that there is a greater likelihood that some case somewhere will elevate to SCOTUS to finds public funding of abortions to be unconstitutional and therefore the Leftwing leadership is MORE worried that they’ll lose yet another source of extorted donations and laundered tax money.
The worshipers of Moloch must have their blood sacrifices.
This is nothing new in the world.
Jack said : “that Senator Susan Collins and Jeff Flake have some guts and decency. I’m pretty sure about the former, not at all sure about the latter.”
Personally, I think Senator FLAKE is very appropriately named.
Could it reasonably be said that as much as some think confirming Kavanaugh would do harm to the legitimacy of the singularly most important non-electoral position that our nation has, on the balance, a single unsubstantiated claim derailing the process of confirming a spectacularly qualified judge would do equal harm to the process and legitimacy of future judges?
Like the left gives a damn. The rules are what you hamper your opponents with, not what you abide by, if you are progressive.
If either Collins or Murkoskey (sp?) do not vote to confirm, the R party must actively primary them at the next opportunity whenever that might be. Until then, removal from senior committee assignments. Both should be advised of this first thing in the morning.
Having to wear a bi red K around their necks probably won’t happen,but there must be a terrible price to pay for hissy-fits that subvert the process and the future of the Republic.
Everyone pushing these polls as something useful…well, they are useful in showing us why direct democracy will always devolve into a pure mobocracy or a “guided mobocracy” run by an aristocracy which controls the lines of communication (in this case the Media on behalf of the DNC).
Everyone pushing these polls as something useful haven’t done a very good job showing me where polling is mentioned in Article 2 Section 2 of the Constitution…
Maybe a resident Leftist here can help me out.
The appeals to polling are some attempt to threaten the Senators with being voted out of office if they don’t bend to the will of currently whipped up mob.
Let the Senators vote. Then the only poll that matters can happen in November. Then 2 Novembers from now, then 2 more Novembers after that.
A related article.