Fun with Cory Booker
Cory Booker Twitter Laughs of the Day! Part one: Sen. Booker holds himself up as an example of people who are trying to overcome partisanship through his elevated, non-divisive rhetoric.
Part two: Having apparently gone from emulating Kirk Douglas movies to Bette Davis movies, Sen. Booker storms out of the Kavanaugh Committee vote meeting in a huff, earning himself a hilarious new nickname to replace “Spartacus.”
Kavanaugh and the case for mistaken identity, Part II
After I suggested mistaken identity as a likely explanation for Christine Blasey Ford’s certainty that Brett Kavanaugh was her attacker, an article appeared that reinforces that theory.
I had said that both Dr. Ford and Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh seemed utterly sincere in their testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist and professor at the University of California, Irvine, says it’s absolutely possible that both actually ARE sincere. After spending decades researching human memory –- specifically, how it can change based on suggestion and other factors –- she says it’s very common to misremember details of an experience, particularly a traumatic one.
She says some “core” details might be remembered but peripheral ones not so much. That echoes what Dr. Ford herself said in testimony, as she tried to explain why she didn’t know where the party was or how she got home. But over time, memory changes, according to Loftus, especially with exposure to new information, and that’s something Dr. Ford didn’t go into. “Changing the details of an actual memory is a relatively easy thing to do,” Loftus says. “And it can happen spontaneously.”
What about victims who are “100 percent certain” of the identity of their attackers, as Dr. Ford said she was? “Sometimes people are very, very certain and wrong,” says Loftus. That’s just the point I was making in bringing up The Innocence Project, which uses DNA to exonerate people who were wrongly convicted and given long prison sentences for violent crimes. There have been many innocent men sent to prison for decades because the victim in the case was “100 percent certain” of her attacker’s identification. Literally hundreds have been exonerated through DNA testing. Mistaken ID is the cause of 70 percent of wrongful convictions. If victims and other eyewitnesses were always right about this, we'd have much less need for an Innocence Project.
Perhaps a victim remembers being pushed into a room or onto a bed, for example, but isn’t clear on who did it. She’s always going to remember certain details central to the attack itself, but, over time (in this case, 36 years), other details may come to be remembered quite differently from the way they happened. These might even include the identity of the attacker. The victim becomes convinced of that person’s guilt and even can create vivid new “memories” of what happened. Every time the mind replays them, they are reinforced.
Of course, someone in Kavanaugh’s situation can misremember, too, perhaps because of too much alcohol. A perpetrator may become totally convinced he’s innocent when in fact he isn’t. So how can we tell that Kavanaugh really is as innocent as he genuinely thinks he is? Well, we can look at his calendar to get an idea of what he was actually doing, consider his basic nature and values, how he lives his life, what his legions of friends and colleagues (male and female) who have known him for most of his life say about him. The allegations against him are just wildly inconsistent with what his longtime, close acquaintances know about him. So it seems highly unlikely that he ever did such a thing.
Anyway, mistaken identity would account for the overwhelming probability that Kavanaugh is 100 percent innocent while Dr. Ford is 100 percent sure he’s the one who attacked her. This is the problem with automatically believing the victim in every case. It doesn’t mean the victim is lying, just that she’s 100 percent convinced of something that might be wrong. Of course, that doesn’t matter one bit to Senate Democrats, who are 100 percent desperate to keep Kavanaugh (or any Trump nominee) off the Court.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/kavanaugh-hearing-very-very-certain-wrong-202229531.html
"Huckabee" preview
After a week like this last one, you need to wind down with a new episode of “Huckabee” on TBN, and I have a great one for you! Sen. Mike Rounds and former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer will be on hand to try to make sense of the sanitarium that DC has turned into. Investigative journalist Ronald Kessler will tell us about his new book, the first “insider” look at the Trump White House based on real insiders speaking on the record and that isn’t a smear job. Then we’ll take a much-needed break from politics with “Chewbacca Mom” Candace Payne, who’ll teach us how to laugh our troubles away. I’ll have my own commentaries, some crazy news “in case you missed it,” and a few more surprises. All topped off with terrific music from country star Collin Raye.
That’s tonight at 8 and 11 EST time (7 and 10 CST), repeated at the same times on Sunday, on TBN. To find your local TBN outlet, and see full previous episode online, visit https://www.tbn.org/programs/huckabee
Your Fake News Alert for Saturday:
One of yesterday’s big stories, waved around like a bloody shirt by Senate Democrats, was that the American Bar Association was calling for a delay in Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS confirmation vote until the FBI investigated the evidence-free allegations against him. The request was conveyed to Sen. Grassley in a letter from ABA president Robert M. Carlson. Yeah, about that…
Turns out that Carlson took it upon himself to write the letter and didn’t bother getting the approval of the ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which rates judges. The committee issued a swift rebuttal, noting that the committee is independent of the ABA (meaning Carlson had no right to speak for them), and that their previous rating of Kavanaugh was “not affected.” For the record, that rating was “well-qualified” by unanimous vote.
Maybe Mr. Carlson should consider running for president of the American Baloney Association.
Not enough evidence
Sen. Jeff Flake caved to the Democrats and joined the cry for yet another FBI investigation into Judge Brett Kavanaugh after some women accosted him on an elevator and demanded to know how he could vote to put that man who attacked a woman onto the Supreme Court.
Just ponder that for a moment: thanks to the hysteria whipped up by Democrats who have exhibited open contempt for due process rights and presumption of innocence, those women, and I’m sure many others, actually believe it's been established as fact that a man with three-plus decades of sterling public service and exemplary character is guilty of heinous behavior 36 years ago because of an unproved accusation by one person who can’t produce a scrap of evidence, whose witnesses all deny it, and whose story is filled with holes.
How many holes? Rachel Mitchell, the nonpartisan, objective, female prosecutor who specializes in sexual abuse cases and who questioned Kavanaugh’s accuser before the entire nation on Thursday, said that based on the answers she received, she not only would not have taken this case to court, there wasn’t even enough evidence to request a search warrant to look for any evidence to try to take it to court.
And yet, Democrats, in cynical defiance of the Constitution they took an oath of office to protect, have convinced a large swath of the nation that he’s guilty, guilty, guilty! Do they really believe that the cheap political advantage they earned by destroying a man’s reputation, bringing death threats to his family, and shredding the very concept of innocent until proven guilty was worth it? Sadly enough, I’ll bet they do.
https://www.westernjournal.com/prosecutor-not-enough-evidence-even-obtain-search-warrant-kavanaugh/
If Ms Mitchell’s assessment of the case against Judge Kavanaugh is not enough to convince someone that there’s no “there” there, Sen. Ted Cruz, who is a Harvard law grad and former Texas Solicitor General and UT law professor, went through the allegation piece by piece to demonstrate why this is a genuine example of a case that “no reasonable prosecutor” would ever take to court.
https://www.westernjournal.com/ted-cruz-dismantles-case-kavanaugh-piece-piece/
Israel's announcement
I hate to distract the media’s attention from such serious matters as the latest fantasmagorical allegations against Republicans from sleazy porn star lawyers, but this week, they sort of overlooked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealing a bombshell in every sense of the word.
In an address to the UN in New York, Netanyahu said he was disclosing for the first time that Iran has another secret nuclear storage facility in Tehran containing as much as 300 tons of nuclear-related equipment and material. Netanyahu alleges that since Israel obtained a cache of Iran’s nuclear secrets and revealed them to the world, Iran has been trying to hide the evidence by clearing out its atomic warehouse and moving its massive stockpile of nuclear materials to other places. He presented visual aids showing the location and capacity of these alleged nuclear facilities. Netanyahu also praised the US for reimposing sanctions to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions and blasted European nations for helping Iran bypass sanctions.
In response, Iran denied the allegation, with a spokesman declaring convincingly that the “world will only laugh loudly at this type of false, meaningless and unnecessary speech and false shows.”
I’ve got a pretty good sense of humor, but I’m not laughing. Are you?
https://www.westernjournal.com/netanyahu-rocks-un-iran-secret-atomic-warehouse/
Trump signs spending bill
There was some talk of President Trump refusing to sign the latest $854 billion spending bill and sparking a government shutdown, which I’m sure Democrats would have loved to demagogue just before the election. But he went ahead and signed it, saying he’s pleased with it overall, although he objected to the huge levels of spending that somehow still failed to include full funding for his promised border wall.
Trump said the bill does contain additional funding for border security, including $1.6 billion to continue building a wall; plus increased funding for school safety, mental health and opioid abuse, and record defense spending, including the biggest pay raise for military members in a decade. As for the full funding of the border wall, the White House said they will “have that discussion after the election.”
Frankly, after voters saw their Senate in action on Thursday, I imagine a lot of them wouldn’t mind if at least half of it got shut down for good.
https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-signs-spending-bill-avert-government-shutdown/
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