Wednesday Reads: Graham Platner, Just Because

Posted: July 8, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Graham Platner

I’m going to write about Graham Platner today, because I am pissed off.

I have to believe that most women with any experience of abusive men could see right away that Platner was not going to be a good candidate for Democrats. I don’t live in Maine, so I haven’t even followed the stories about him that closely. Yet I could see this mess coming.

Frankly, I thought the Nazi tattoo was bad enough, but when I heard a about the racist, sexist, ableist social media messages and the sexting with other women soon after getting married, I thought this guy is a loser. I even hated his facial hair. The last thing we needed was another Eric Swalwell. I didn’t even know until yesterday that Platner served as a mercenary in Iraq. That would have been a red flag for me too. But Maine Democrats liked Platner, so nothing I could do about it.

Later I read the NYT article about women who found his behavior threatening and  talked about his heavy drinking. I was not at all surprised to learn that a woman accused Platner of rape. The signs were all there. I don’t understand why so many people were supposedly shocked.

Maria Kabas had misgivings similar to mine. She writes at The Handbasket: We didn’t need a rape accusation to know Graham Platner was unfit.

Since we learned last fall about the Maine Democratic senate candidate’s Nazi insignia tattoo, the personal revelations about the Marine veteran and oyster farmer have only gone downhill from there. But an initial instinct told me not to weigh in. Let the people of Maine decide for themselves, I thought. I watched from New York as the public learned about shitty stuff he’d posted online, his previous work for the private military contractor Blackwater, and the sexually explicit texts he sent to other women while married to his current wife (which were flagged by her to his campaign as a concern.) And when the New York Times published a story just a few days before the June primary detailing “unsettling” behavior alleged by three women Platner had dated in the past, while I weighed in on social media, I shied away from opportunities to explicitly spell out how dangerous I believed him to be. He went on to win the primary.

It turns out the instinct that kept me from vocalizing my opinion on Platner was the same as the one that prevented Jenny Racicot from coming forward with allegations of a 2021 rape—that is, until this week. “One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,” Racicot, who had dated Platner a few years back, told Politico. My position is in no way analogous with Racicot’s, but I, too, had a latent feeling that turning on Platner was in some way turning on an opportunity to kick Republican Susan Collins out of the senate, and possibly regain control of the entire chamber.

While Racicot was one of the women in the NYT story, the stomach-churning details of her sexual assault were for whatever reason not reported then. But on Monday, she said it all: “I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me. I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’” She describes Platner letting himself into her home while “almost blackout drunk” and having sex with her against her will. Now that we have a fuller picture of Platner’s malfeasance, there is finally consensus around what has long been clear to many of us: he’s a dangerous man. If only the earlier evidence was enough.

Marisa Kabas

When the NYT story dropped on June 4th describing “unsettling” behavior alleged by three women Platner had dated in the past, people who I considered political heroes insisted continuing their support. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders stuck by Platner, even when there was already more than enough evidence that he was not fit to be the Democratic candidate. Both Warren and Sanders finally pulled their support this week after the rape allegations were published, but it shouldn’t take a woman sharing details about a grotesque intimate experience to knock a man off his pedestal.

Meanwhile, men (and some women) who I nominally considered allies not only defended Platner at the time, but disparaged anyone concerned by the allegations.

Read more at the link. The men Kabas names as allies are people I can’t stand, like Ryan Grim and John Favreau, but even so, she had no problem seeing that Platner was trouble. Her “progressive” male examples:

Ryan Grim, a progressive journalist and co-founder of Drop Site News, tried to undermine the allegations because one of the women from the story, Lyndsey Fifield, is a Republican. He then went on the progressive podcast Breaking Points and said the Platner situation was good because it was forcing Democrats to confront bigotry against white men. “The current cultural divorce between progressives and white men is so, like, stark that it is—it’s just culturally, morally, ethically wrong,” Grim said. “But also just pragmatically, from a political perspective, you can’t build a national party if you assume every white guy or every white guy with a deep voice who is a combat vet or whatever is, like, out to get you.”

Jon Favreau of Pod Save America defended Platner at every turn and mega-streamer Hasan Piker vocally stood by him. The Substack journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote that continuing to defend Platner showed that “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”

Read more at the link.

Here’s the Politico article by Jessica Piper and Adam Wren in which Jenny Raciot described her rape: Exclusive: Woman who dated Graham Platner says he sexually assaulted her.

A woman who dated Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.

The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to POLITICO in three interviews over the past two weeks. POLITICO also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.

Jenny Racicot

Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.

“I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” she said. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”

Racicot previously described “reckless” and “unsettling” behavior by Platner to The New York Times, but says she didn’t go public with the specific assault claim because she didn’t want to be known as a rape victim.

Racicot said she later felt compelled to go public about her experience because the reaction to the Times story was dominated by controversy about another woman, Lyndsey Fifield, who alleged Platner mistreated her and faced attacks because of her ties to the Republican Party. (Contacted by POLITICO, Fifield stood by the allegations she made to the Times and declined to comment further.)

“My part of the story was just a read-over,” Racicot said in an interview. “And the story was Lyndsey, and the accusations of her being politically motivated.”

For many Platner supporters, that report crossed a line. But why was anyone surprised?

Here are some of the “red flags” from the June 4 article by Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer  in The New York Times, headlined (gift article): Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior.

In interviews with The New York Times on Wednesday, several women [described] Mr. Platner as a fun and caring partner…saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationships ended.

But in extensive conversations over the past two months, three other women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and “toxic” relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.

Mr. Platner could be charming and charismatic, they recalled in interviews, but also demeaning to women and, in at least one case, even physically threatening. He drank heavily and was regularly unfaithful….

Lyndsey Fifield

Lyndsey Fifield, 40, a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns, recalled him as “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our ‘weakness.’” Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts “reminded me of just how much he hated women.”

Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.” […]

The women who described difficult relationships with Mr. Platner knew him at different points of his life. Ms. Fifield said she dated him starting when they were both in their late 20s in Washington, during a time Mr. Platner has described as challenging. Ms. Racicot knew him in Maine when they were in their mid-30s and he was living in Sullivan, Maine, and working on his oyster farm.

The third woman, a Democrat from Maine who spoke on the condition of anonymity, had a long-distance relationship with Mr. Platner on and off for years, as recently as 2016.’

The three described him in similar terms. Spending time with him could be exhilarating, they said. But they also recounted patterns of heavy drinking and womanizing. Asked to sum up how he treated her, the third woman said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.”

It’s too bad that Racicot didn’t describe the rape for this earlier article–perhaps Platner would have lost the primary. But to me, Fifield’s experiences should have been enough.

Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he “never hit me, he never punched me.”

But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.

During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.

“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”

Ms. Fifield also recalled that Mr. Platner’s displays of weaponry and discussions of violence sometimes left her uneasy.

Apparently, some people dismissed her story because she is a Republican. I thought it sounded authentic.

Yesterday, The Washington Post published this story by Amy Brittain, Liz Goodwin, and Amy B. Wang with more information from Lyndsey Fifield: Ex-girlfriend of Graham Platner says he removed condoms without consent during sex.

An ex-girlfriend of embattled Senate candidate Graham Platner told The Washington Post that he repeatedly removed protection without her consent when they were having sex.

Lyndsey Fifield, who said she dated Platner from 2013 to 2015 in D.C. and has previously accused him of physical abuse, said that she told Platner on multiple occasions that he had to wear condoms during sex because she was not on birth control.

“He would pull condoms off,” she said in an interview. “He would do it in a sneaky way. He wouldn’t tell me.”

Fifield, 41, is the second woman to allege this week that Platner engaged in nonconsensual sexual conduct. Jenny Racicot, 41, who said she previously dated Platner, told The Post and other outlets on Monday that he sexually assaulted her in late 2021, leading a growing number of allies to drop their endorsements and call on him to withdraw from the race for a Maine seat in the U.S. Senate….

Fifield initially told The Post about the alleged condom removal during a June 20 interview that was off the record. She said she decided to speak publicly about it Tuesday in part because, she said, she wanted to show that Racicot was not alone in experiencing issues with Platner involving sexual consent.

Removing a condom during sex without consent, known as “stealthing,” is classified as a form of sexual assault in several countries, including Britain, Canada and parts of Australia. In the United States, Maine, California and Washington state have laws that address the nonconsensual removal of condoms during sex. The alleged incidents involving Platner took place in D.C., Fifield said.

She estimated that Platner removed condoms without her consent at least six times when they had sex at both of their residences in D.C. during their two-year, on-and-off relationship. She said she told him that she was upset about it but that he would make light of the situation.

“I confronted him both during and after [sex] because he knew that I was not on birth control and how dangerous that was,” she told The Post in one interview. In another, she said: “He would act like cute about it, like ‘Oh sneaky me.’”

The guy is a complete asshole. I just can’t understand why Democrats supported him for so long.

Graham Platner

This piece at MSNOW is by Michael A. Cohen, who opposed Platner’s candidacy from the beginning: Why Graham Platner’s progressive supporters ignored glaring warning signs.

For nine months, Graham Platner’s supporters have insisted that Democrats should ignore the mounting evidence of his personal foibles and political vulnerabilities — and support his bid for the Senate in Maine.

They argued that his Nazi “Totenkopf” tattoo was a youthful indiscretion and parroted his ludicrous argument that he didn’t know the origins of the Nazi insignia that was on his chest for 18 years before he covered it up with more ink. They waved away his dozens of racist, misogynistic and, frankly, creepy Reddit posts. They said his sexting with as many as a dozen women soon after his wedding was between him and his wife. They insisted that he was the best candidate to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, even as polling showed him badly underperforming other Maine Democrats.

On Monday, they ran out of excuses and rationalizations.

Jenny Racicot’s story of Platner’s alleged assault is stomach-turning, and while some Democrats will seemingly excuse antisemitism, a Nazi tattoo and persistently bad behavior toward women, sexual assault is the line the party won’t cross.

Now Democrats are abandoning Platner in droves, but the signs were there all along. Cohen:

The first lesson is don’t fall in love with an unvetted political outsider — or, for that matter, any politician. When he announced his candidacy, Platner told a compelling story. He was a political outsider with no experience in electoral politics, a Marine combat veteran and an oyster fisherman in a state where working on the water is a badge of honor.

But as quickly as Platner emerged, so too did the stories of his past deeds — his controversial Reddit posts, his Nazi tattoo and an actual life story that didn’t quite match up with his campaign narrative.

Platner’s supporters claimed he’d grown and matured and that his bad behavior was the result of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered in Iraq….

Redemption and maturity are certainly attributes to be celebrated, but perhaps it would have been better for Platner to work out his personal issues in private, not under the harsh klieg lights of one of the most competitive Senate races in the country….

Second, where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.

With Platner, it wasn’t just one news cycle of bad stories. It was a constant drumbeat — and many of these allegations shared the same theme: Platner disassembling and distracting.

It turned out that, far from being a successful oyster fisherman, his biggest customer was his mother, who runs a restaurant. Platner’s claims of a hardscrabble youth were contradicted by stories of living off his parents’ generosity and stints at an elite private school.

When the New York Times published on-the-record accounts of him allegedly physically assaulting a former girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, Platner and his allies dismissed the claim by arguing that Fifield is a Republican and thus can’t be trusted.

There’s more at the link. Again, the simple truth is the signs were there all along.

Graham Platner shows the tattoo he got to cover up the Nazi one.

Get this: Platner is demanding that his replacement share his progressive politics as a condition for his dropping out! Andrew Howard and Jessica Piper at Politico: Graham Platner’s campaign says it contacted state party to discuss process if he drops out.

Graham Platner’s campaign said it had reached out to the Maine Democratic Party to discuss the process for replacing him if he were to drop out of the state’s U.S. Senate race.

The acknowledgment came after the state party accused the campaign of improperly trying to influence that succession process, and it’s the clearest indication yet Platner is considering leaving the race after saying Monday he was “taking the time to reflect” on his bid for Senate.

Devon Murphy-Anderson, the party’s executive director, said in a Tuesday night press release and social media video that Platner’s campaign staff had repeatedly reached out to the state party in an attempt to “put their thumb on the scale” in selecting his replacement.

“We’ve repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, nor in determining what this process looks like,” Murphy-Anderson said. “We have also reiterated that Graham Platner must drop out of this race so that Democrats in Maine can focus on defeating Susan Collins this November.”

Read the rest at Politico.

Two more speculative posts on what comes after Platner:

Christa Dutton at NOTUS: Ties to Graham Platner Could ‘Haunt’ a Replacement.

Democrats are coming to realize Graham Platner will be a specter in Maine’s Senate race even if he ends his campaign.

Platner has denied the allegations of sexual assault and misconduct from former girlfriends that have ratcheted up pressure on him to drop his bid for the seat. Still, Democrats who anticipate he will be forced to end his run told NOTUS their party has a unique challenge: Democrats need a replacement candidate who is distant enough from Platner to avoid his toxicity, but not so far from his politics that they would undermine the Democratic primary voters who nominated Platner.

Given that this is playing out in one of the most competitive Senate contests in the country, any ties to Platner could become an issue for a potential alternative candidate — and the rest of the Democratic Party, they said.

Nate Cohn at The New York Times: Why Democrats Would Probably Come Out Ahead if Platner Dropped Out.

It may be only a matter of time before Graham Platner drops out of the Maine Senate race.

If he does, it’s too soon to say who might replace him, but it’s not too early to suggest that his replacement would probably be a modest favorite against Susan Collins, the longtime Republican incumbent. The same couldn’t be said for Mr. Platner, even before he faced a rape accusation on Monday.

If the race does get a reset, it will be an enormous break for Democrats. Without a victory in Maine, their path to control of the Senate is extremely challenging — not just in 2026, but potentially even if they secure the tiebreaking vice presidency in 2028. It would be an exaggeration to say Mr. Platner was doomed before the latest allegation, but his candidacy was already in a lot of trouble.

To take one example from last week’s New York Times/Siena poll of Maine: Thirty percent of Mr. Platner’s own supporters said his various controversies were making them question whether they could support him. Although he led Ms. Collins in the poll by two percentage points, it was an open question whether he would be able to withstand another round of controversy — and another round seemed all but inevitable. The extraordinary speed with which Mr. Platner’s loyalists pushed him to withdraw after the allegation Monday is partly a reflection of how badly he was wounded. He was already near the breaking point….

If he drops out by next Monday, the Maine Democratic Party will get to choose his replacement. It would have until July 27 to select a new nominee, and my colleague Reid Epstein reports that Maine Democrats are considering several means of doing so, from a pop-up convention to a statewide caucus. Most of the likeliest Democratic replacements aren’t especially well known statewide or nationally, but in this political environment Ms. Collins would be in jeopardy against any one of them.

On paper, this is a race Democrats should win. Yes, Ms. Collins has won many times before, despite Maine’s Democratic lean, but that does not mean she should be expected to defy political gravity forever.

I think Platner should drop out today, and certainly before the weekend. Maine Democrats need to make sure it happens.

Sorry this isn’t a news post, but this is an important issue. Women need to pay attention to and call out the red flags that men just don’t seem to notice. Platner was poison from day one. Women in politics need to pay attention to the signs and speak out loudly.

Lazy Caturday Reads: Scandals Galore!

Posted: April 11, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

By Mary Cassatt, 1883-84

The negotiations about the proposed cease fire in the Iran war are expected to begin soon, but meanwhile the news in the U.S. is suddenly filled with scandalous stories.

Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Melania Trump’s mysterious announcement to the White House press; I have a bit more context to add to that. Then last night the news about serious accusations of sexual misconduct by Eric Swalwell broke. There’s also news about Kristy Noem’s husband and his identity crisis.

I’ll get to those items, but I want to begin with a feel-good story for once.

Marcia Dunn at AP: Artemis II’s record-breaking journey around the moon ends with dramatic splashdown.

HOUSTON (AP) — Artemis II’s astronauts closed out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, blazing new records near the moon with grace and joy.

It was a dramatic grand finale to a mission that revealed not only swaths of the lunar far side never seen before by human eyes, but a total solar eclipse and a parade of planets, most notably our own shimmering Earth against the endless black void of space.

With their flight now complete, the four astronauts have set NASA up for a moon landing by another crew in just two years and a full-blown moon base within the decade.

The triumphant moon-farers — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen — emerged from their bobbing capsule into the sunlight off the coast of San Diego.

In a scene reminiscent of NASA’s Apollo moonshots of yesteryear, military helicopters hoisted the astronauts one by one from an inflatable raft docked to the capsule, hauling them aboard for the short trip to the Navy’s awaiting recovery ship, the USS John P. Murtha.

“These were the ambassadors from humanity to the stars that we sent out there right now, and I can’t imagine a better crew,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said from the recovery ship.

NASA’s Mission Control erupted in celebration, with hundreds pouring in from the back support rooms. “We did it,” NASA’s Lori Glaze rejoiced at a news conference. “Welcome to our moonshot.”

Read more at the AP link.

Now for the feel-disgusted news about Eric Swalwell. Based on what I’ve read, it’s surprising that this didn’t come out sooner. Apparently, he’s been DM young women, sending dick picks, and sexually assaulting women for years.

CNN: Exclusive: Four women describe sexual misconduct by Rep. Eric Swalwell, including a former staffer who says he raped her.

A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.

“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman told CNN of the incident, which she said happened in 2024 after she had stopped working in Swalwell’s office. “He didn’t stop.”

By Francesca Strino

She said it was the second time Swalwell had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk. In 2019, when she was still working for him, she said she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.

Three other women who spoke with CNN also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman – including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.

One woman who connected online with Swalwell over her interest in Democratic politics says she ended up extremely drunk inside his hotel room after a night out with the congressman, with little memory of what occurred. Earlier in the night at a bar, he kissed her and touched her leg without her consent, she said.

Another woman, who described receiving unsolicited nude messages from Swalwell, was social media creator Ally Sammarco. She said she initially reached out to the congressman on Twitter to discuss politics. “I truly never thought he would respond – I had like 1,000 followers at the time,” she said. “And he actually responded.”

Swalwell denied the women’s allegations.

“These allegations are false and come on the eve of an election against the front-runner for governor,” Swalwell said in a statement to CNN. “For nearly 20 years, I have served the public – as a prosecutor and a congressman and have always protected women. I will defend myself with the facts and where necessary bring legal action. My focus in the coming days is to be with my wife and children and defend our decades of service against these lies.”

I don’t think that’s going to work. These are not subtle accusations, and the women told others about their experiences at the time. Sammarco saved the messages she got from Swallwell. A bit more from CNN:

One member of Swalwell’s staff said they quit immediately after receiving CNN’s detailed list of questions about the allegations.

CNN found corroboration for key elements of each of the women’s claims, including the former staffer who said she was sexually assaulted. Two family members and a friend said in interviews with CNN that she told them about the alleged 2024 assault in the following days, and CNN also reviewed text messages she sent two friends describing her allegations at the same time. “I was sexually assaulted on Thursday,” she wrote to one of her friends, adding: “By Eric.”

The woman also shared medical records related to her receiving STD and pregnancy testing after the alleged assault.

For the woman who connected online with Swalwell over Democratic politics, a family member and two friends confirmed she told them last year about the incident where she ended up intoxicated in his hotel room. CNN also reviewed messages between her and Swalwell, including a photo he sent her that matches footage of him during a CNN interview in her city on the night they met in person.

There’s still more at the link.

Politico: Jeffries, Pelosi and other Democrats call on Eric Swalwell to end governor campaign.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi headlined a growing list of Democratic lawmakers called on Rep. Eric Swalwell Friday to withdraw his campaign for California governor amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

Lily Walton with Raminou, 1922, by Suzanne Valadon

“This extremely sensitive matter must be appropriately investigated with full transparency and accountability,” Pelosi said in a statement. “As I discussed with Congressman Swalwell, it is clear that is best done outside of a gubernatorial campaign.”

In a joint statement with other elected House Democratic leaders, Jeffries called for a “swift investigation” as well as the end of his pending campaign.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday that a former congressional aide accused the congressman of two sexual encounters without her consent, beginning in 2019. CNN later reported that four women allege that Swalwell has committed sexual misconduct, including one former staffer who accuses Swalwell of rape….

Key backers of Swalwell’s governor bid swiftly revoked their support after the Chronicle’s story was published, including Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Adam Gray (D-Calif.), who served as campaign co-chairs.

“Today’s reports about Eric Swalwell’s conduct while in office are deeply disturbing,” Gray said in a statement. “Harassment, abuse, and violence of any sort are unacceptable. Given these serious allegations, I am withdrawing my support and Eric Swalwell should end his campaign immediately.”

But nothing underscored the peril for Swalwell’s nearly two-decade political career as vividly as Pelosi’s statement. The former speaker included Swalwell in her inner circle of favored Democratic members for years, tapping him for junior leadership roles and to serve as a manager in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021.

Read the rest at the link.

The Melania Trump story might have stayed on social media if she hadn’t decided to make a public statement at the lectern that is supposed to be reserved for the POTUS. But it’s out there now, and she will have to deal with it.

It began with a disturbing story in The New York Times on March 20: Trump Friend Asked ICE to Detain the Mother of His Child.

Last June, the man credited with introducing President Trump to his wife asked the administration for a favor.

Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent turned presidential special envoy, had learned that his Brazilian ex-girlfriend was in a Miami jail, arrested on charges of fraud at her workplace. They had been in a custody battle over their teenage son. Now he saw an opportunity.

Eduard Manet, Woman with a Cat, 1880

He reached out to a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, explaining that his ex was in the country illegally, according to records obtained by The New York Times and a person familiar with the communications. Could she be put in ICE detention? That could help him get his son back.

The official, David Venturella, promptly called the agency’s Miami office to ensure that ICE agents would pick up the woman from the jail before she was released on bail, according to the records and a person with knowledge of the conversation who requested anonymity to discuss it. During the call, Mr. Venturella noted that the case was important to someone close to the White House.

The woman, Amanda Ungaro, was placed in ICE custody and ultimately deported, an outcome that may well have happened regardless of Mr. Zampolli’s meddling. But the ICE official’s willingness to spring into action for a Trump ally — even one in a low-level, largely ceremonial role — reflects a recurring theme of the second Trump administration: The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.

I read this story when it was published, but I didn’t make the connections I should have.

Amanda Ungaro is on X AKA Twitter, and she is fighting back. If you have access, you can read the many tweets she has been sending to Melania.

Melania is apparently sensitive about how she came to the U.S. In fact Zampolli is the one who brought her here and got her an H1-B visa. When she first arrived, she moved into a building occupied by other models who worked for Zampolli’s agency. It looks like Melania has really stepped in it. The Epstein files are back in the news.

From Julie K. Brown, the journalist who originally wrote about Epstein in The Miami Herald, at her Substack The Epstein Files: Could a former Brazilian model be the whistleblower Melania Trump is afraid of?

The First Lady’s unprecedented public statement about Jeffrey Epstein yesterday raised a lot of questions about what, if anything, is about to be revealed about Donald and Melania Trump’s relationship with the late sex trafficker.

The Epstein case had quieted down in the wake of Trump’s decision to attack Iran — some critics allege that was one of Trump’s goals in launching a war in the first place — to cool the MAGA furor over DOJ’s inept release of the Epstein files.

Now it seems that plan, if true, has led to a Jack-In-The-Beanstalk effect — as in trading a cow for beans and climbing into danger without really thinking it through.

Because there is another story that I admit I missed when it ran in the New York Times a few weeks ago.

It appears that the Trump administration may have targeted Zampolli’s ex-girlfriend, a former Brazilian model named Amanda Ungaro, deporting her back to Brazil amid her custody battle with Zampolli over their teenage son.

As the NYT’s story notes: “The levers of the federal government can be pulled to settle a personal score.”

Self-Portrait with a Cat, created by Frida Konstantin

In this case, the score involved Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who was appointed last year by Trump as special envoy for “global partnerships,” which allows him to travel the world to advance trade and other partnerships with the U.S.

Just days ago, he was in Hungary with Vice President Vance, supporting the re-election of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an effort to publicly back the right-wing leader in the days running up to the election.

Zampolli, 56, was in Epstein’s orbit around the time that Trump met Melania in 1998. He was also friends with Epstein, as the two entertained a business deal over buying a modeling agency.

And Zampolli’s name is in the Epstein Files, with Epstein noting in one email that he was “trouble.”

Still all the drama surrounding Zampolli’s custody battle with his estranged girlfriend didn’t connect any dots, at least not for me, until the First Lady’s speech yesterday.

Read the rest at the link.

The New York Times has another piece about Melania’s statement today: Trump Says First Lady ‘Had a Right’ to Talk About Epstein.

President Trump said Friday that he had known his wife wanted to speak about Jeffrey Epstein at some point, and that he “thought she had a right to talk about it,” even if he had not known what exactly she planned to say.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Trump said in a brief telephone interview, referring to the remarks Melania Trump made from the entrance hall of the White House a day earlier.

“I didn’t know what the statement was,” he said, “but I knew she was going to make a statement.”

The first lady’s comments certainly came as a surprise to many other people who work in the White House, according to two officials familiar with the situation who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter. It was not clear why she had chosen that moment to talk about Mr. Epstein. Absent any explanation, questions and feverish conspiracy theories swirled.

The president said his wife had been agonizing for a long time over her press coverage and rumors connecting her to Mr. Epstein. What was particularly upsetting to her, Mr. Trump explained, was one theory positing that it was Mr. Epstein who introduced her to her future husband. In her remarks on Thursday, Mrs. Trump recounted the story of meeting Mr. Trump “by chance at a New York City party in 1998.” She said she did not encounter Mr. Epstein for the first time until two years after that.

“She finds it very insulting,” Mr. Trump said of the rumors. “And I said, ‘If you want to do that, you can do that.’ I said if she wants to do it — I didn’t recommend it, but I said, I let it be her, I said, if you want to do it. …”

He added, “She didn’t meet me through Jeffrey Epstein. And I could understand her feelings. But I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it.’”

He would not say when exactly he had this discussion with the first lady, but said that “it wasn’t a big discussion. I’d say it lasted for about two minutes. I had no problem. I thought she actually did a good job.”

He’s lying, obviously. I doubt if she told him. Now she has revived interest in the Epstein files and Trump can’t be happy about that.

The Black Cat, by Carl Wilhelm Wilhelmson , 1922, Swedish, 1866-1928

The last scandal for today–the Kristi Noem story. The story was originally in the Daily Mail, but it’s behind a paywall.

The Independent: Kristi Noem’s husband offers cryptic three-word answer to report that he talked about leaving wife and becoming a woman.

Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon Noem, has pushed back on a report that he insulted his wife in phone calls and online messages with a dominatrix and expressed a desire to become a woman.

Bryon Noem told The Independent the claims in the report were “not all true.” He did not elaborate when asked for more information.

The 56-year-old was reported to have been in an on-off relationship online with Shy Sotomayor, a 30-year-old sex worker known as Raelynn Riley, since 2016, she claimed in an interview with the Daily Mail, published Friday.

It is the latest in a series of exposés on the husband of the recently ousted Homeland Security Secretary, who has been keeping a low profile since the story broke last week.

Sotomayor shared recordings of phone calls and screenshots of messages she said she exchanged with Bryon Noem, where he said she was “so much better” than his wife. He also expressed wanting to transition to become a woman, the messages showed.

In one recent message, the South Dakota insurance boss said he wanted to change his name to Crystal “so bad,” and that he wanted plastic surgery. “I want to be your trans bimbo b****,” the messages showed.

The outlet linked Bryon Noem’s telephone number to the messages with Sotomayor, and it also corresponded to an email address under the pseudonym “Chrystalballz666.”

The messages reportedly from Bryon Noem appear in stark contrast to Kristi Noem’s opposition to transgender rights. As South Dakota governor, she signed an exclusionary bill to ban surgical and non-surgical gender-affirming treatments for children in the state, and barred transgender girls and women from playing on women’s sports teams.

Read the rest at The Independent.

There’s no news on the Iran talks yet, so I’ll end this with two disturbing Iran stories:

The New York Times: Iran Unable to Find Mines It Planted in Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Says.

Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.

The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.

Woman with a cat, Pierre Bonnard

Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.

Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.

Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.

As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.

Raw Story: Hegseth’s key Iran claim collapses as US intel finds Iran has thousands of missiles.

One of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s main defenses of the U.S. decision to negotiate a controversial ceasefire with Iran is that its ballistic missile program has been “functionally destroyed.”

But that claim has now been shot down by U.S. intelligence assessments, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

“Iran still has thousands of ballistic missiles in its arsenal that it could use by retrieving launchers from underground storage areas, according to American officials familiar with U.S. intelligence assessments,” said the report. “The assessments come as the U.S. is working to cement a cease-fire that would fully open the Strait of Hormuz and also insulate Iran, American troops and states in the region from further attacks. Some American officials said they are concerned that Iran will use the break in fighting to reconstitute some of its missile arsenal.”

The conflict has taken a toll on Iran, with around half of its missile stockpile lost, the assessment found — but “it retains thousands of medium- and short-range ballistic missiles that could be pulled out of hiding or retrieved from underground sites, said U.S. and Israeli officials.”

This comes as even a number of Republican and conservative analysts are crying foul about the terms of the ceasefire, which appear one-sidedly in favor of Iran.

That’s it for me today. I guess it’s okay to focus on salacious stuff on the weekend. Happy Caturday!

Thursday Reads

Posted: January 10, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 37 Comments

Good Morning!!

Having a childish, incompetent madman in charge of the government is so exhausting. How much more of this can we take? Today, Donnie is headed for the Texas border with Mexico to do something or other. Who knows what insane gibberish will spew from his deformed lips. All I know for sure is that it won’t make sense.

Donnie has been touting his “steel slat” fence for the past week, but guess what? Those slats can be cut through with a common household saw.

NBC News: Test of steel prototype for border wall showed it could be sawed through.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly advocated for a steel slat design for his border wall, which he described as “absolutely critical to border security” in his Oval Office address to the nation Tuesday. But Department of Homeland Security testing of a steel slat prototype proved it could be cut through with a saw, according to a report by DHS.

A photo exclusively obtained by NBC News shows the results of the test after military and Border Patrol personnel were instructed to attempt to destroy the barriers with common tools.

The Trump administration directed the construction of eight steel and concrete prototype walls that were built in Otay Mesa, California, just across the border from Tijuana, Mexico. Trump inspected the prototypes in March 2018. He has now settled on a steel slat, or steel bollard, design for the proposed border barrier additions. Steel bollard fencing has been used under previous administrations.

However, testing by DHS in late 2017 showed all eight prototypes, including the steel slats, were vulnerable to breaching, according to an internal February 2018 U.S. Customs and Border Protection report.

Photos of the breaches were not included in a redacted version of the CBP report, which was first obtained in a Freedom of Information Act Request by San Diego public broadcaster KPBS.

Gail Collins mocks Donnie’s wall obsession at The New York Times: Trump Hits the Wall. And what’s all that sniffling about?

We need to look at the bright side of Donald Trump’s border wall fixation.

Sure, he’s shut down the government and thrown the nation into chaos. But it could be worse. He could be demanding a fiery moat between us and Canada. Or building a 36,000-foot-deep barrier across the Pacific Ocean to drive home his commitment to tariffs.

See? There’s always a silver lining.

On Trump’s strange oval office address:

Maybe all this wall obsessing makes Trump tired. He certainly seemed low-energy during his Oval Office address. “He makes Jeb Bush look like a combination of Mighty Mouse and Bruce Springsteen,” a friend of mine said after the president finished his nine-minute speech to the American people.

For every viewer whose response to the talk was “Wow, we should do something about immigration!” there must have been a hundred whose first reaction was “Why does this man keep sniffing?” Deviated septum? Nasal polyps? Trump’s breathing has actually sounded strange for a long time, but most of us have chosen to ignore it rather than engage in a national conversation about the president’s nose.

If you watched the address — and really, you could have, it was only about as long as it takes to microwave popcorn — you saw a 72-year-old guy squinting at the teleprompter and making rather alarming breathing sounds while reading a speech about how we need a wall to protect women who are “sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico.”

This is not a man who should wrap his arguments around the idea of protecting women from sexual assault. But also, gee, he sounded like Uncle Fred who you haven’t seen for a while and suddenly he shows up for Thanksgiving with weird colored hair and vacant eyes and he’s talking into his mashed potatoes.

As the Trump shutdown continues, the administration has been giving tone-deaf advice to government employees who are going without pay.

The Washington Post: Coast Guard families told they can have garage sales to cope with government shutdown.

Employees of the U.S. Coast Guard who are facing a long U.S. government shutdown just received a suggestion: To get by without pay, consider holding a garage sale, babysitting, dog-walking or serving as a “mystery shopper.”

The suggestions were part of a five-page tip sheet published by the Coast Guard Support Program, an employee-assistance arm of the service often known as CG SUPRT. It is designated to offer Coast Guard members help with mental-health issues or other concerns about their lives, including financial wellness.

“Bankruptcy is a last option,” the document said.

The Coast Guard receives funding from the Department of Homeland Security and is subjected to the shuttering of parts of the government along with DHS’s other agencies. That stands in contrast to other military services, which are part of the Defense Department and have funding.

This is interesting, from Buzzfeed News: ICE Might Be Violating Federal Law By Keeping Immigrants Detained During The Shutdown.

A lengthy government shutdown over border wall funding has potentially put Immigration and Customs Enforcement at risk of violating a more than 100-year-old law that could not only require the release of “non-dangerous” individuals in the agency’s custody but also stop it from continuing to arrest and detain certain people, according to former senior ICE officials and experts.

The potential violation could complicate ICE’s operations at a time when President Donald Trump has argued that the shutdown is necessary to force Democrats to implement tougher immigration policies, such as building a wall on the US–Mexico border.

ICE contracts with nonfederal detention facilities, like county jails and private detention contractors, across the country to hold individuals detained by immigration agents. The agency pays for the bed space in various ways, including monthly payments or, in some cases, in advance.

As of Jan. 1, the agency was detaining more than 48,000 individuals, which is 8,000 more than the levels that had been provided for by the now-expired congressional funding. But nearly three weeks after its funding lapsed because of the shutdown, ICE has likely run out of money to pay contractors for the detention space it uses.

And while ICE has some non-appropriated funds it can lean on, those are not enough to pay for the overall detention space for more than a few weeks, said Kevin Landy, who was appointed during the Obama administration to run ICE’s Office of Detention Policy and Planning, a position he held for more than six years, up until 2017.

In other news, Kamala Harris is close to announcing a run for president in 2020.

KCBS Radio: Kamala Harris Ready To Enter Race For President, Sources Say.

Sen. Kamala Harris has decided to run for president in 2020 and will announce her candidacy on or around Martin Luther King Jr. Day, probably at a campaign rally in Oakland, sources close to the freshman senator from California tell KCBS Radio.

Harris, 54, has been making the rounds of television talk shows and appearing at several events this week as part of a brief tour to promote her new book, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.”

At every stop, when asked about running for president, Harris has answered with some variation of “I’m not ready yet” to announce her decision, citing family considerations. But several sources knowledgeable about her plans say she is ready, and has in fact decided to run, with the enthusiastic blessing of her husband and two stepchildren.

The debate within her camp is how, and where, to launch her campaign. The tentative plan is for Harris to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination with a campaign rally, most likely in Oakland, where she was born and began her legal career.

And the media continues to belatedly vet Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign. Politico: Top Bernie Sanders 2016 adviser accused of forcibly kissing subordinate.

On the final night of the Democratic National Convention in July of 2016, Bernie Sanders’ staffers went out to a Mediterranean restaurant and hookah bar in Center City Philadelphia to celebrate and mourn the end of the campaign.

Sitting at the bar sometime after midnight, convention floor leader Robert Becker—who oversaw Sanders’ Iowa campaign, then helped lead his efforts in Michigan, California, and New York as deputy national field director—began talking with a female staffer who had worked under him along with her boyfriend.

Becker, now 50 years old, told the 20-something woman that he had always wanted to have sex with her and made a reference to riding his “pole,” according to the woman and three other people who witnessed what happened or were told about it shortly afterward by people who did. Later in the night, Becker approached the woman and abruptly grabbed her wrists. Then he moved his hands to her head and forcibly kissed her, putting his tongue in her mouth as he held her, the woman and other sources said.

The woman said she didn’t come forward at the time, because Sanders’ campaign was over. But when she was recently contacted by Becker about 2020 the women felt she had to speak up.

“Candidates who allow people like Robert Becker to lead their organizations shouldn’t earn the highest office in our government,” said the woman, who was granted anonymity because she feared retaliation from supporters of Sanders and Becker, who has a loyal following of his own.

“It just really sucks because no one ever held him accountable and he kept pushing and pushing and seeing how much he could get away with. This can’t happen in 2020. You can’t run for President of the United States unless you acknowledge that every campaign demands a safe work environment for every employee and volunteer.”

 

Thursday Reads: Horror Show on the Hill

Posted: September 27, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: misogyny, morning reads, Psychopaths in charge, Surreality, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 133 Comments

Good Morning!!

Today beginning at 10AM, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a brief hearing in which one of the women who has accused SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, Christine Blasey Ford, will tell her story and Kavanaugh will respond by lying and obfuscating.

I can’t imagine anything useful could come out of the hearing, since each questioner will have only 5 minutes to address complex issues. At best, the spectacle of 11 white men hiding behind a woman prosecutor might lead to more public outrage against the GOP and their deeply flawed nominee. It’s not clear what how Democrats will handle the questioning; they’ve kept their plans close to the vest.

I wanted to get this post up early so we can follow the hearing and aftermath together. I hope people will join in. Here are some reads to check out today.

The Daily Beast: ‘Disaster’: Trumpworld Starting to Sweat Over Brett Kavanaugh’s Mounting Sexual Assault Allegations. Excerpt:

Going into this past weekend, the Trump White House was sounding self-assured about Kavanaugh’s prospects, with senior aides saying they felt he could weather the allegations and horrifically bad press. Since then, two other female accusers have come forward, and the swagger from Team Trump has been replaced with, at best, a shaken confidence.

Officials inside the White House, as well as outside advisers, told the The Daily Beast that mood has become less bullish. Senior aides fear delivering Trump a major failure and humiliation that he can—and likely will—pin on those around him and squeamish Republican lawmakers. There is palpable fear that the party’s base will turn on Republicans should the Kavanaugh nomination fail.

Top donors, meanwhile, have said that they will continue writing checks out of a growing fear that the party could lose the Senate in addition to the House this coming fall. But one major contributor warned that lawmakers had to show them that they had put up a sufficient fight to get Kavanaugh on to the Court or else the checks wouldn’t come….

At this point, Trump’s team and Kavanaugh’s camp are publicly maintaining calm and privately encouraging allies to do the same. On a Monday conference call with White House surrogates, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, had insisted that the “president and this White House continue to stand strongly behind Judge Kavanaugh,” according to a person on the line. By Wednesday, a senior West Wing official said that the president’s posture remained unchanged.

But aides also acknowledge that Kavanaugh’s prospects were growing more endangered. “Thursday could be a disaster or it could be…a victory, we don’t know,” one aide said, referencing the planned testimony Kavanaugh and his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford plan to give to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Yesterday during his deranged press conference, Trump seemed to suggest that he could decide to dump Kavanaugh. But he was all over the map in his embarrassing, manic performance. Todd Purdum summarizes Trump’s 81-minute rant at The Atlantic: President Trump’s Surreal News Conference Didn’t Do Kavanaugh Any Favors.

In more than 80 surreal minutes of what seemed less like a news conference than a public free-association session on a therapist’s couch, the president of the United States dismissed accusations of sexual misconduct against Judge Brett Kavanaugh as “all false to me,” then insisted he wanted to hear Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony because “I can be convinced of anything. Maybe she will say something.”

He portrayed Kavanaugh’s Democratic Senate opponents as the organizers of a “big, fat con job,” then acknowledged without missing a beat that he would withdraw Kavanaugh’s nomination “if I thought he was guilty of something like this, sure.” He praised Kavanaugh as “one of the highest-quality people that I have ever met,” then suggested that the judge’s life was not so spotless, allowing that even George Washington may have had “a couple of things in his past.” [….]

Who can say whether Trump’s apparently unbridled, even unhinged, display of id amounted to just that? Or to a free-form, last-ditch effort to defend the nomination on the eve of crucial testimony from Ford and Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday? Or to a calculated trial balloon for withdrawing it (“I could pick a woman, and she could have charges made from many years ago also,” he said at one point)? Or to some combination of all of the above? The assessment of Nicolle Wallace, the former George W. Bush and John McCain aide, was succinct, and indisputable.

“I suspect,” she tweeted, “that the 25th Amendment might be discussed more widely if there were daily press conferences.”

Yesterday, Morning Consult released a news poll on the Kavanaugh nomination: Republican Women Lose Faith in Kavanaugh — and Trump — After Week of Accusations.

Public support for Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat has dropped to its lowest point since President Donald Trump nominated him in July, driven in large part by a sector of the president’s base: Republican women.

A new Morning Consult/Politico poll, conducted Sept. 20-23, found support for Kavanaugh’s confirmation is underwater among registered voters for the first time since his nomination, with 37 percent opposing the Senate confirming him and 34 percent supporting it.

The new finding marks a 5-percentage-point drop in net support since a poll conducted last week, after Christine Blasey Ford detailed her allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while the two were in high school, a charge he has repeatedly denied.

Read more at the link above.

Important reads from women writers:

Lili Loofbourow at Slate: Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding.

For what it’s worth, and absent evidence or allegations to the contrary, I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s claim that he was a virgin through his teens. I believe it in part because it squares with some of the oddities I’ve had a hard time understanding about his alleged behavior: namely, that both allegations are strikingly different from other high-profile stories the past year, most of which feature a man and a woman alone. And yet both the Kavanaugh accusations share certain features: There is no penetrative sex, there are always male onlookers, and, most importantly, there’s laughter. In each case the other men—not the woman—seem to be Kavanaugh’s true intended audience. In each story, the cruel and bizarre act the woman describes—restraining Christine Blasey Ford and attempting to remove her clothes in her allegation, and in Deborah Ramirez’s, putting his penis in front of her face—seems to have been done in the clumsy and even manic pursuit of male approval. Even Kavanaugh’s now-notorious yearbook page, with its references to the “100 kegs or bust” and the like, seems less like an honest reflection of a fun guy than a representation of a try-hard willing to say or do anything as long as his bros think he’s cool. In other words: The awful things Kavanaugh allegedly did only imperfectly correlate to the familiar frame of sexual desire run amok; they appear to more easily fit into a different category—a toxic homosociality—that involves males wooing other males over the comedy of being cruel to women.

In both these accounts, Kavanaugh is laughing as he does something to a woman that disturbs or traumatizes her. Ford wrote in her letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, “Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with [Mark] Judge, who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state. With Kavanaugh’s hand over my mouth, I feared he may inadvertently kill me.”

“Brett was laughing,” Ramirez says in her account to the New Yorker. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.” She recalled another male student shouting about the incident. “Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said.

If these allegations are true, one of the more shocking things about them is the extent to which the woman being mistreated exists in a room where the men are performing for each other—using the woman to firm up their own bond.

Please read the whole thing if you haven’t already.

Alexandra Lescaze, also at Slate: We Didn’t Call It Rape. Lescase writes that the allegations against Kavanaugh are very familiar to her as a graduate of a DC-area private school.

I wish I were surprised. A week ago Sunday when Ford first shed her anonymity, detailing her sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh to the Washington Post, I wrote a note in the Facebook alumni group of my high school, National Cathedral School. I told my 1988 classmates that Ford’s story was bringing back disturbing high school memories. Apparently, I was not alone. A lot of women now in their 40s and 50s, who went to these single-sex D.C. prep schools in the 1980s, have been reaching out to each other in fraught emails and chats over the past week. Not only did the Holton-Arms alumnae start a petition in support of Ford, their fellow alum; there’s also one for anyone to sign who survived that toxic time and place.

I don’t personally know Ford now, and I didn’t know her in high school. But as the Holton women wrote, what Ford is alleging is “all too consistent with what we heard and lived while attending Holton. Many of us are survivors ourselves.” And what Elizabeth Rasor alleges Mark Judge told her is not foreign to me, either. Whether and how the nation comes to hear more about these specific stories, they have evoked a collective scream.

A large part of my high school experience were the parties at cavernous houses with multiple bedrooms, huge dark basements with enormous sofas and yards, and lots and lots of beer. No parents—thinking back on it now, as a parent myself—were ever around. We traveled in groups and knew never to leave a friend alone at a party, but there was so much drinking that we sometimes lost track of each other. It could be difficult to know where your friends were and—if they were in a room with a boy—what was going on in there.

Every June, we had Beach Week—a tradition also described in a Washington Post piece about Ford—in which teenagers actually rent houses to party at the beach, something I still don’t quite comprehend. I distinctly remember being at a Beach Week party with my then-boyfriend when it dawned on us that there was a drunk girl in a room down the hall, and boys were “lining up” to go in there and, presumably, have their way with her. We didn’t know for sure, but my boyfriend and my friend’s boyfriend went to interrupt it and sent her on her way down the stairs. All I remember about her is that she was in the class above us and had dark hair. My friend has told me she remembers boys saying, “I’m next,” which was why our boyfriends went to stop it.

More to check out, links only:

Emily Jane Fox at The Atlantic: “I Was Ashamed”: After Ford’s Accusation, Holton-Arms Alumnae Wrestle With Their Own Truths—Together.

Jessica Valenti: How Very Bad Men Get Away With Rape. “It takes one person to commit a rape, but a village to let them get away with it over and over.”

Kate Manne at The New York Times: Brett Kavanaugh and America’s ‘Himpathy’ Reckoning.

Amanda Marcotte: GOP will still confirm Brett Kavanaugh — because of allegations, not in spite of them.

If you watch the hearing, I hope you’ll share your reactions in the comment thread below.

Lazy Caturday Reads: Senate Dotards Determined to Put Attempted Rapist on Supreme Court

Posted: September 22, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 26 Comments

Reading a book, watched by a cat, by David Brooke

Good Morning!!

Everything is so surreal in the U.S. today that I feel as if I’m living in a Salvador Dali painting. I don’t even know how to begin to write about what’s happening right now. If you watched Rachel last night, you know that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s attorney responded to 85-year-old dotard Chuck Grassley’s nasty message threatening to hold a vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination until Ford agreed to testify before his committee on Wednesday–a day before she said it was possible to do so.

Slate: Christine Blasey Ford’s Lawyer Issues Scathing Letter in Response to Judiciary Committee’s Deadlines.

The Senate Judiciary Committee tried to initiate a Friday night game of chicken with attorneys for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault. The committee had issued a 10 p.m. ultimatum for Ford to agree to testify by Wednesday, stating that the vote to confirm Kavanaugh would proceed on Monday without her agreement. Ford’s lawyers did not bite.

Ford’s attorney Debra S. Katz responded to the ultimatum with a strongly-worded letter decrying the “aggressive and artificial deadlines” as an attempt “to bully Dr. Ford.” Katz explains that Ford had “traveled to meet with the FBI for several hours about the death threats she had been receiving,” and that her legal team requested time “to be able to provide you with a well-considered response.”

“Your cavalier treatment of a sexual assault survivor,” Katz writes, “is completely inappropriate.”

Read the entire letter and read about Grassley’s threats at the link. Hours later Grassley sent a tweet that read as if it were intended to be an email or text message:

Followed by this one:

Historian Michael Cohen posted this in response to the first one:

Followed by this from Frank Rich:

Seriously, why is an 85-year-old man still in the Senate? We need age limits.

I think this piece at Deadspin provides a very good explanation for the behavior of all the right wing white men who are having tantrums over Kavanaugh when they could easily withdraw his name and have Trump appoint someone who didn’t try to rape a 15 year-old-girl when he was in high school–maybe someone who didn’t work in the Bush White House on torture and who wasn’t involved in stealing Democratic emails, and who hasn’t lied repeatedly to Congress.

Brett Kavanaugh is a Man the Right Can Get Behind, by Albert Burneko

By Rita Cavallari

Shit’s real weird now.

A thing it took, like, the New York Times and Washington Post and CNN and so forth maybe a little too long to figure out, back during the 2016 campaigns, a lapse that has launched innumerable blinkered Cletus Safaris in search of some other, less chillingly sociopathic answer in the aftermath of that hell-moment, is this: What the American right wants, what it’s after, isn’t some abstract pluralist success, like the smooth functioning of government and/or the material improvement of American life. It wants, only and entirely, to defeat its opponents. Those aren’t quite the same thing. The Republican party would not choose the former if it could be accomplished without the latter.

An example: Any number of grub-like Yale jurist-ghouls with diamond-edged ‘80s-dad hair and uniformly right-wing ideas about constitutional law could get confirmed to fill the Supreme Court’s vacant ninth seat, and once in that seat could be counted upon to plagiarize Anton Chigurh dialog into incumbent legal precedence for the next three decades. The earth contains no shortage of these. And so, in the aftermath of the discovery that Brett Kavanaugh, the one Donald Trump happened to nominate for the gig, quite likely attempted to rape a 15-year-old girl in the summer of 1982 (and, perhaps less important though no less relevant, almost certainly lied to the Senate about the use of stolen materials to aid George W. Bush’s judicial nominees) and has been living comfortably with this fact about himself for the ensuing 36 years, it should be easy enough to withdraw his nomination and move along to the next crypto-Nazi cottage cheese sculpture in the pipeline. He’d breeze through confirmation, whoever he was: You could pretty much count on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s terminally third-brained centrist Democrats lining up to play themselves. And that would be a success, theoretically: A new, arch-conservative Supreme Court justice, possibly even one not tainted by a credible accusation that he once tried to rape a child.

by Sonya Grassmann

But that would not be enough. It has to be this guy. It has to be this guy now more than ever. It has to be this guy, now, because he has been accused, credibly, of attempting to rape a 15-year-old girl in 1982—moreover because people believe this should be considered a disqualifying blight on his record. The thing that must happen is that those people must be defeated. That is the whole point. What must be shown to the whole world is that this, even this, cannot stop him. The bigger the outrage that can be brushed aside, the more thorough the defeat for the people who thought something, anything, might take precedence over this white man being the pick of another white man.

A bit more:

It’s a bit late for anyone not to have figured this out yet, but the skeleton key to understanding American conservatism is this: At bottom, it lacks absolutely any moral or ideological underpinning beyond the reactionary protection of moneyed white men—of their station, their wealth and power, and their egos. Its supposed ideas and abstractions are just a framework for spasmodic lashing-out against anything that can be interpreted as a threat to rich white dudes. It likes supply-side economics because the supply side is made of rich white dudes. It likes tax cuts because the taxes are mostly cut for rich white dudes. It likes cops and soldiers because cops and soldiers uphold a social order with rich white dudes at the top. It likes “traditional family values” because social, economic, and sexual dominion over women are the most traditional family values of all. It likes “Make America Great Again” because rich white dudes used to roll through society and over everyone else with even greater impunity than they do now. All of these things are just proxies for reiterating, over and over and over, forever, the power and security and primacy of rich white dudes.

There’s much more at the link. I hope you read all of it.

The Girl with the Book. Otar Imerlishvili (Georgia, 1970-)

As we all know, there actually was a witness to the rape attempt, Kavanaugh’s high school buddy Mark Judge; but the Judiciary Committee dotards are determined that he will not testify. And here’s why:

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

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.

By Wlad Safronov

“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.

Read the rest at the WaPo.

Another take from The Intercept’s Peter Maas: Mark Judge’s Memoir about Kavanaugh’s High School Portrays a Culture of Aggression and Excessive Drinking. I won’t quote from it, but there are lots of excerpts from the book that are relevant to why Grassley wants to keep Judge very far away from his Committee hearing.

And then there’s another of Kavanaugh’s close friends, Ed Whelan–the man behind the swiftboating of John Kerry–and his doppleganger theory.

Politico: PR firm helped Whelan stoke half-baked Kavanaugh alibi.

It turns out that the Keystone Cops detective work by conservative legal activist Ed Whelan — which set Washington abuzz with the promise of exonerating Brett Kavanaugh, only to be met by mockery and then partially retracted — was not his handiwork alone.

Woman with a Cat – Tatyana Gorshunova

CRC Public Relations, the prominent Alexandria, Virginia-based P.R. firm, guided Whelan through his roller-coaster week of Twitter pronouncements that ended in embarrassment and a potential setback for Kavanaugh’s hopes of landing on the high court, according to three sources familiar with their dealings.

After suggesting on Twitter on Tuesday that he had obtained information that would exculpate Kavanaugh from the sexual assault allegation made by Christine Blasey Ford, Whelan worked over the next 48 hours with CRC and its president, Greg Mueller, to stoke the anticipation. A longtime friend of Kavanaugh’s, Whelan teased his reveal — even as he refused to discuss it with other colleagues and close friends, a half dozen of them said. At the same time, he told them he was absolutely confident the information he had obtained would exculpate the judge.

The hype ping-ponged from Republicans on Capitol Hill to Kavanaugh’s team in the White House, evidence of an extraordinarily successful public relations campaign that ultimately backfired when Whelan’s theory — complete with architectural drawings and an alleged Kavanaugh doppelgänger — landed with a thud on Twitter Thursday evening.

Read the tick tock at the link. Politico claims the White House wasn’t involved in this insanity, but I don’t believe that for one minute. Kavanaugh has spent days at the White House figuring out how to deal with this scandal, and I have no doubt Kavanaugh was the source of the theory that someone else did it. He even told Oren Hatch that it could be a case of mistaken identity.

One more from Politico: Ed Whelan’s Troubles Might Be Just Beginning. He’s playing a dangerous game with the law, by John Culhane.

Ed Whelan may have just crossed a line he can’t jump back over.

Woman with cat, by Yana Movchan

Yesterday, Whelan, the president of the Ethics and & Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, and an assertive supporter of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, took to Twitter to lay out a Hardy Boys-inspired scenario, suggesting that Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh of attempted rape in high school, might have been mistaken about the identity of her alleged sexual assaulter. Using a mash-up of yearbook photos, Zillow information, Google Maps and Facebook, Whelan laid out a “case” that another man, a former classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Georgetown Prep—whom he named and provided a current photograph of—might have been the person Ford has in mind. After his wild theory received widespread criticism, Whelan deleted the tweets, and tried to walk back the accusation this morning.

The common law of defamation isn’t that complicated. To be liable, the defendant must make an intentionally or negligently false statement about the plaintiff that tends to cause reputational harm, and harm must actually ensue.

The man Whelan accused has already been harassed by the media. Read more about libel law at Politico.

I’m out of space, and I haven’t even written about the New York Times’s irresponsible article about Rod Rosenstein. Links to Emptywheel’s takes on that:

NYT GIVES TRUMP HIS EXCUSE TO FIRE ROD ROSENSTEIN.

THE NYT “SCOOP” APPEARS TO BE AN EFFORT TO SPIN OPENING AN INVESTIGATION INTO TRUMP AS AN ERRATIC ACT.

That’s all I have for you today. What stories are you following?

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